Our Lady of the heterotopia: An empirical theological investigation of heterotopic aspects of the Church of Our Lady, Trondheim

Abstract

Interpreting the Lutheran church of Our Lady of Trondheim Norway in the light of Michael Foucault‘s spatial of heterotopia, the article explores the capacity of a church space to become a site of ritual and spatial justice for people living in with different kinds of marginality. The article contributes to the development of the relationship between spatial theory and Christian social practice and the contextual theology arising from this relationship. While the majority of scholars of diaconia draw on Norwegian systematic theologian Trygve Wyller‘s appropriation of Foucault‘s theory, this article builds on the British sociologist Kevin Heatherington‘s elaboration of the theory. Instead of understanding heterotopic spaces as overtly ethical spaces, the article follows Hetherington in exploring how Foucault‘s heterotopic spaces are sites of unsettled and unresolved agonism. This theoretical move opens up for seeing the displacements of space, bodies and practices in the church of Our Lady as sites of ambivalence and negotiation.