Boston's Hidden Sacred Spaces

FAIN: MN-277119-21

Center for Independent Documentary, Inc. (Newton, MA 02458-1341)
Michael Abraham Epstein (Project Director: June 2020 to present)

Production of a digital media project exploring non-traditional places of religious worship in the Boston area.

“Boston’s Hidden Sacred Spaces” is an immersive media project that provides an entry point for exploring how religious life in the United States is changing. Specifically, it provides close readings of hidden chapels, meditation spaces, and prayer rooms that people in Boston pass daily but few stop to closely consider. This project uses innovative, digital-based story-telling to show how religious life is being diffused and reshaped as people see and experience the sacred in new ways through these hidden sacred spaces. In partnership with NPR, the project team will expand its prototype to 10 diverse spaces in greater Boston - including a port, a correctional facility, a campus, a shopping mall, and an island military chapel. They will tell the story of each of these spaces, illustrating through detailed audio and 3D models the effects of immigration, responses to religious diversity, and the architecture of the sacred that underlie American religious change between 1950 and the presen