In Mircea Eliade’s seminal work The Sacred and the Profane, he notes that religious [humans] “experience two kinds of time: the profane and the sacred” (104). The repetition of a ritual or the “cosmicization” of a space is to get closer to the gods (32). Is this possible in contemporary and public spaces? What of helping the sacred erupt in profane spaces?
For four years, the lifelong formation department of a Chicago-based seminary has partnered with The Way of the Cross, a non-profit in the historically Mexican neighborhood of Pilsen in Chicago. The event mobilizes hundreds of volunteers and thousands of participants for Via Crucis, a mile-long re-enactment of the stations of the Cross.
This paper uses Via Crucis as a way to explore this question: what can we learn about public religious practice and nontraditional theological education in the face of dwindling traditional church communities and seminaries?