Qualitative Research
Qualitative research is broadly ‘interpretivist’ in nature, as it is concerned with how the social world is interpreted, understood, experienced and produced.1 Since the research question of the passion project underlying this monograph regards the transfer, transformation and reconstruction of Christian ritual repertoire in Dutch late-modern society, and the search for traces of God in this newly appropriated ritual repertoire, qualitative research methods seemed to be the more appropriate tool to employ. Over the years, sociologist Jennifer Mason’s formulation of some of the difficult questions that can be raised when considering intellectual puzzles and research questions have been helpful in structuring and re-structuring the research design: 1. the ontological perspective; 2. the epistemological position; 3. the broad research area; 4. the intellectual puzzle; 5. the research questions; 6. the aims and purpose.2 In all these questions the active reflexivity of the researcher is at stake. I have already discussed questions 3, 4, 5 and 6 in the Prologue, but here I would briefly like to dwell on the ontological and epistemological choices with which the researcher is confronted. In this section I will ground myself on ontological and epistemological reflections and elaborations that can be found in previous research on ritual.3
The ontological perspective concerns the researcher’s view on the nature of the entities that are investigated. In this book, I take these entities to be ritual practices in the broadest sense, and I likewise understand participants in the broadest possible sense (e.g. I also consider a newspaper columnist or blogger who writes on The Passion to be a participant). A ritual, however, is more than its actual performance: the ritual is also interpreted, understood, experienced and produced. I distinguish between four different layers in the ritual practices of The Passion:4
- 1. the ritual practices as perceived by the researchers and the participants (e.g. those involved in shaping the ritual, or who participated in the performance of The Passion by attending the ritual on the square/in the procession/via social media/by watching on TV);
- 2. the reconstructions of the ritual practices by the (same) researchers and participants (e.g. people’s comments on The Passion in the media and via social media; things people told me during interviews; fieldnotes taken after participatory observations on the square, during and after meetings held by the organisers);
- 3. the interpretation of the ritual practices by the researchers and the participants as they reconstruct their perceptions at a later stage (e.g. organisers who reflect on the phenomenon that The Passion has become on TV talk shows; theologians and others who publicly interpret the ritual in the media, also: the interpretations that are offered in this book);
- 4. the interpretation of the interpretation of the reconstructions in further academic discussions and societal and ecclesial discourse (e.g. previous academic and professional publications on The Passion, this book as a whole, and, based on this book: my activities of knowledge dissemination in the public sphere, church leaders that use the book for study groups in their churches, the use of the book in education, e.g. for students training for the ministry, or post-academic training of clergy, etcetera).
None of these levels ‘is’ the ritual, and on all levels various actors take part in various discourses that are part of the ritual discourse.
My epistemological position that, in this research project, knowledge of reality is acquired by various actors, namely the researchers and participants, relates closely to these different levels. Participants acquire embodied knowledge by participating in the ritual (level 1), the researcher excavates this knowledge in the form of data by means of an ethnographic approach (for example through immersion and participation in ritual settings; level 2).5 The researcher interprets this interpreted knowledge using theories from different disciplinary fields (level 3), and relates this to interpretations that arise in academic discussions and societal and ecclesial discourses in a cyclical process (level 4). The type of knowledge that his project yields is thus not focussed on getting to ‘evidence’ or even ‘truth’; the knowledge generated by the ontological entities takes, rather, the epistemological form of perspectives and arguments.
Meta-Theoretical Choices
Practical theologian Richard Osmer, in an article published in 2011, has explored two levels at which paradigms influence practical theology today.6 The first level is that of reflective practice, and the second is the meta-theoretical level, at which the researcher takes decisions that influence the shape of their research. Osmer states that practical theologians must explicitly or implicitly deal with at least four metatheoretical issues: models of cross-disciplinary work, the theological rationale that justifies their approach, the theory-praxis relationship, and sources of justification. In my Prologue I have already mentioned that I take a transversal approach regarding cross-disciplinary dialogue. I will here further reflect on the relationship between theology and the other disciplines, and then briefly address my choices with respect to the other three issues.
The transversal approach is based on “a fluid and dynamic understanding of the relationship between the disciplines”.7 Values and perspectives intersect in the new knowledge that is created in this cross-disciplinary dialogue. In this practical theological study, I have taken up theories from a number of disciplines (mostly philosophy, anthropology, digital media studies, sociology, and theology) to shed light on the transfer, transformation and reconstruction of Christian ritual repertoire from various complementary perspectives. Particularly in Part 2, each chapter and disciplinary perspective is independent of other chapters, yet, I wrote these chapters and formed these perspectives in the context of a practical theological dialogue (i.e. this book) that intends to add to a profoundly theological discourse (the God-question). No disciplinary perspective in this conversation can be reduced to any of the other disciplinary perspectives. This also holds for theology, which is a discipline in its own right. As a theologian, I see participants do more than just produce and engage in a ritual event; I see, that is I actively read into their practices, a quest for God. This is something that philosophers, anthropologists, sociologists and scholars in digital media studies do not see. Particular theological knowledge arises at the intersection of the different disciplinary perspectives which comes together around this ritual event as they pool their rational resources; it emerges out of (theoretical or) disciplinary triangulation.8
With respect to the other three metatheoretical issues: I understand Osmer’s thoughts regarding the nature of praxis, and theory’s relationship to it, as an issue which overlaps with my account of the ontological perspective (cf. the four layers of ritual practices) and with the epistemological position (embodied knowledge combined with theoretical interpretation) that I have taken in this research, as described above.9
With regards to the sources of justification used in this research, I seem mostly to have drawn upon the sources of experience and reason; Scripture has played a particular role in the four side lights in which I creatively reflected on the preceding treatises. Tradition did not take on a particularly prominent role, although it perhaps played a more-general part in my description of changes in Christian ritual repertoire describing the transfer and transformation of older, more ‘traditional’ forms, and, more particularly, in my linking of the passion to ecclesial practices of Holy Week passion performance during the fourth century CE, and of processional practices in The Passion to the longer ecclesial tradition of processions inside and outside of church buildings.
The theological rationale that justifies my approach in this study is founded on two convictions. The first is a sacramental understanding of ritual that has characterised my theology practice over the past twenty years: the conviction that God (whether or not called by that name) and faith are always mediated and welcomed in our physical existence through embodied practices. This is why my approach and Kearney’s anatheistic theory combine well together: the sacramental imagination is an important part of Kearney’s work. The second conviction that shapes my theological rationale, and which I have already discussed in the Prologue, is my theologically informed interest in people and practices that are looked down on by other people who know all too well how God wants things to be, and what is theologically right. These are pre-eminently the people and practices to pay attention to.
An Ethno-Case Study
This project was set up as an ethnographic study; a research method that I had used before. In 2011, I published a liturgical-musical ethnography on the sound of worship in two Christian churches in the city of Amsterdam: a Surinamese and a Ghanaian congregation. The ‘ethnos’ that I joined for nine months in both cases was, compared to the passion project, relatively well demarcated and straightforward to research: the respective congregations consisted of a relatively stable group of some 60 and 200 people, who gathered for worship in the same place every week. Those who performed the worship – the ministers, members of church choirs, and other musicians – were the same people almost every week, so after nine months of fieldwork I had become acquainted with almost everyone who regularly worshiped in these congregations.
In my fieldwork on The Passion, I was soon confronted with ‘next level complexities’, as this case significantly differed from the previous cases that I had investigated. How to describe ‘the ethnos’ here? The actors and parties involved in this project were hugely diverse and they were located in so many different places. How to combine ethnography amongst people in real life with digital/virtual/online/cyber ethnography, how to distinguish between the offline audience and the online audience, or even to make such a distinction in the first place? How to deal with the extreme fluidity of this practice, with an audience that differed from one year to another and only got together for 90 minutes? And how to deal with the producers and broadcasters who spent a couple of months intensively working on each edition as well as with the other media that were increasingly involved? Similar questions arose in relation to other concepts relating to ethnographic fieldwork. How to describe ‘the field’? How to enter the field when players in this field were not equally easy to approach? What elements should be included within the domain of the research? How to handle the enormous amount of (big) data? And would I ever reach a level of saturation? As The Passion grew bigger after the first edition, I realised that performing a full-fledged ethnography on my own would be undoable: I had to accept that the case would inevitably be fragmented in nature.
A research strategy based on case studies seemed more appropriate for the size and complexity of The Passion since it offers a rigorous method that is suited to, among other things, research that is exploratory in nature.10 Robert Yin, who wrote one of the standard works on the subject, describes the case study as “an empirical inquiry that investigates a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context, especially when the boundaries between phenomenon and context are not clearly evident”.11 This definition seemed to fit the type of case study that I was undertaking with The Passion, the fluidity of the phenomenon and the involvement of the media, in particular, made it look like the case was everywhere. In an article that discusses the challenges of a single case study in practical theological research, Eileen Campbell-Reid argues, in line with Flyvbjerg’s argument which I discussed in the Prologue of this book, that good case studies are able to provide knowledge. She restates the value of case studies for practical theology as follows: “A search in the scholarship of practical theology for universal, predictive theories is in vain. The most valuable knowledge is the context-dependent knowledge found on concrete cases”.12 In Miller-McLemore’s handbook on practical theology, Daniel Schipani takes a definition from the field of pastoral care. He writes that the case study “can be defined as an organized and systematic way of studying and reporting various aspects of a person, family, group, or situation utilising a structured outline of subjects and questions (Asquith 1990: 123–126). In practical theology, the case study method can be used for different purposes, such as “critical and constructive reflection on ecclesial and ministry practice; study, analysis, and evaluation of different forms of faith experience, formation, and transformation; and theory building as well as application or demonstration of theory. In each of those instances, the goal is fundamentally the same, namely, to provide further insight by focusing intensely on a particular case that is approachable from diverse perspectives”.13 Offering a variety of different perspectives on different aspects of one particular case was what I aimed for with my case study on The Passion, however, I did not utilise a structured outline of topics and questions. Quite the reverse, in fact, the influence of the field itself on the choice of topics remained strong. The aspects that I chose to investigate, particularly those discussed in Part 2 of this book, arose from the field. I began with a rather open research question and, in order to get towards an answer, kept using ethnographic research methods, and kept listening to the field, focusing in on what struck me as interesting. I certainly did not work with a list of topics and questions.
The research method eventually took the shape of an ‘ethno-case study’; a hybrid form of research, combining case study research and ethnographic methods. The term for this type of study was coined by scholar in educational studies Marie Parker-Jenkins, who describes it as “an inquiry concerning people, which employs techniques associated with long-term and intensive ethnography, but which is limited in terms of scope and time spent in the field”.14 Parker-Jenkins argues that the main difference between contemporary ethnography and case study research is the degree of immersion in the context and/or data.15 According to her, the advantage of employing the term ethno-case study is that it “sets boundaries for the researcher; acknowledges that it is a study located within a richer, wider context; conveys the sense of conducting an inquiry with people, employing ethnographic techniques; suggests limited research time and immersion in the context and/or data; gives the reader some level of expectation in terms of the project results and claims”.16 In this type of research, it is legitimate to focus investigation on a limited number of themes, and I did this in Part 2, in particular, as I focussed on the spatial, ludic, reflexive and public-theological aspects of The Passion, using a selection of different disciplinary perspectives.17 In each of these chapters I have described how the different topics arose from within the field. In hindsight, I should acknowledge that a number of those topics are related to public aspects of the ritual; it may be the case that my attention was particularly drawn to the public character of the event. Possibly, this was the result of public discourse on religion and secularity in which those with a negative view on religion hold the opinion that religion belongs (or should move) to the private domain. Some have claimed for a long time that the public domain should be ‘neutral’, i.e. void of religious practices and expressions. It has struck me that, notwithstanding, or perhaps even because of this discourse, The Passion was staged in the public sphere and was not banned from it, but was able to grow into a large media over the course of eight years.
At the end of her discussion of the power and dangers of a single case study, Eileen Campbell-Reid offers four brief guidelines that, in my view, are also relevant to ethno-case studies. She writes, first of all, that practical theologians should not refrain from taking the risk of using single case studies as they have the potential to yield practical wisdom, but that researchers should also make sure that they moderate dangers such as personal bias, overgeneralisation, and lack of attention to power dynamics within their research, things which they should also be careful of when considering the researcher’s own role in the situation. I have tried to mitigate these dangers by offering an account of my methodological choices, including possible biases, here, by staying as close as possible to the cases themselves when drawing conclusions throughout the book, and by being attentive to power dynamics during fieldwork (particularly among the organising bodies, since there are many conflicts of interests in the world of producers and broadcasters). I have kept notes on my own role as a researcher in the field and as a theologian in the public domain, seeking to constructively reflect on the power dynamics relating to my own role, and I have included positionality statements in the prologue, here and in the final chapter of this book for the sake of transparency.
Secondly, Campbell-Reed suggests that the relational and participatory character of practical wisdom should be reflected in case studies. This is easier said than done in a case study on an event in the public sphere, which is organised by producers and broadcasters: they are often very busy and are not necessarily interested in a quest for God, for example, nor are millions of participants always equally interested in research. A ‘group’ that has continuously shown interest in the research consists of clergy and church people. They have seen The Passion pop up in the public sphere and, from the first edition onwards, have asked me to help reflect on what the changing role of religion and rituality in the public sphere could mean for the churches. I have also learned from their questions and perspectives and I have often brought the results of this learning back into the research. Church people have been given a place, though a modest one, in the construction of this study, especially in the last side light: the letter.
A third guideline regards the situating of case studies in their historical, social, political and theological contexts. The structure of this monograph enabled me to address these contexts in a natural manner; the subsequent chapters all discuss various aspects of context-setting.
The last guideline that Campbell-Reed mentions relates to the development of bi-cultural expertise, which, in the context of this particular ethno-case study, I take to mean that the researcher should avoid writing a narrative that suffers from academic specialisation and which, as a result, becomes inaccessible to a wider audience. Instead, the writer should make sure that different people (academics as well as professionals in Christian ministry) are able to read and understand the study. As Bent Flyvbjerg rightly states: “The goal is not to make the case study be all things to all people. The goal is to allow the study to be different things to different people”.18 For this reason, I had two colleagues – a biblical scholar with expertise in systematic theology and a colleague in the ministry – read the manuscript critically with an eye to its usefulness both for academics outside the field of practical theology and for theological practitioners; they both made invaluable comments that have immensely improved the comprehensibility of the manuscript for a diverse audience.
Methodological Account of Empirical Research
The empirical data discussed and analysed in this monograph are on the result of fieldwork undertaken on The Passion between April 2011 and October 2019. Data and methodology were both subject to processes of triangulation and, as a result, several different research sources and data collection methods can be distinguished through the course of my text.
Participant Observation in the Square and on TV
I performed participant observation at the squares where The Passion was staged in Gouda in 2011 (with colleague and co-author Marcel Barnard), Rotterdam in 2012 (with two academic colleagues; I also attended the press presentation of the event in Rotterdam a few weeks before the performance), Groningen in 2014 (with colleague and co-author Marten van der Meulen), Enschede in 2015 (with Marten van der Meulen and our research masters student Anita Zijdemans), New Orleans 2016 and Amersfoort (with a colleague in ministry) in 2016. In 2014, I left the square in Groningen after a spending some time there, in order to be able to join students and colleagues at the PThU premises in watching The Passion on TV. In 2013, 2017 and 2019, I watched The Passion on TV at home. In 2018, I watched it at the premises of broadcasting company EO, together with three participants from previous editions: Singer Do (who played the role of Mary in 2011), Charly Luske (Judas in 2012), Howard Komproe (Pontius Pilate in 2016) and some ten EO-employees, prior to the talk show Passiontalk which was broadcast live immediately after the 2018 edition and to which I was invited as a guest.
The online time-shifted viewing screen for The Passion in 2018 presented a number of video clips and broadcasts. From left to right: the talk show Passiontalk (featuring me), the 2018 edition of The Passion, and three brief digital interviews with performers which were launched via socials in the days prior to the performance Screenshot from www.npostart.nl
Semi-Structured Interviews and Informal Conversations
Between 2011 and 2019, we conducted around thirty in-depth semi-structured interviews with a variety of people (producers, performers, cross-bearers, residents of the local municipality, press spokesmen for various bodies, churches); in addition to these one-hour interviews, from 2013 onwards, around ten shorter interviews a year were held with various people in the field.
Between January and May 2015 more-extensive fieldwork was performed (including participatory research), mainly by our student Anita Zijdemans. This research was done in a number of different ways, both with regards to methodology and data. During the preparations for The Passion in 2015, Zijdemans conducted four semi-structured interviews with relevant people from the broadcasting companies EO and RKK – among them the press spokesman and the chief editors – we well as three informal conversations with the photographer for the promotional photoshoots and two singers. The producer was not available for interviews during that period. Additionally, Zijdemans had fifteen to twenty informal conversations with managers from the broadcasting companies, creative and communications people, and other people from behind the scenes. She attended a number of meetings in which decisions regarding the event were made, as well as an evaluation meeting after the event. Her attendance at these meetings was in an observatory role only, which means that the taking of fieldnotes was the most important task. This observatory role demonstrates the limits that were explicitly and implicitly set for the researcher: entering the field was not easy (see below). Part of the preparation for The Passion was to practice the procession with the large illuminated cross that is part of the performance. Zijdemans attended this practice for the procession in Enschede, together with the project manager, the chief editors from RKK and EO, and the executive producer. This enabled us to ask the people participating in the procession about their motivations, but also provided an opportunity to talk to the organisers in a more informal setting. We combined interviews and observations at meetings with participant observation at the event itself in Enschede, where we also conducted around seventy short interviews about the event with people in the audience on the basis of a three-question survey.
Digital Documents
The broadcasters sent us the so-called ‘line-ups’ (detailed outlines of the broadcast with scenes, texts, songs, instructions on ‘instarts’, autocue and camera work) from all nine editions of The Passion. These were mainly used as a secondary source, to double-check our observations or information on the performance, although they were also used as a primary source for two quotations in Chapter 3 (taken from the transcription of the pre-interview with the firemen in Enschede). I received an unpublished PDF-document and a number of emails with information on viewing figures from the market researchers for the broadcasting company KRO-NRCV.
Online Data Sources
A number of online data sources were used more extensively. First and foremost, www.npostart.nl where, after each edition of The Passion, I (re)watched the TV show at least once, often twice. In order to describe and analyse particular topics that were addressed in the subsequent chapters of this book, I used this source in order to watch specific parts of the broadcasts of various editions a number of times: the procession in 2014 and 2015 (Chapter 3), the parts showing the audience when they laughed and the jokes made by the organiser in the 2015 edition (Chapter 5), the scenes in several editions depicting the arrest and conviction of Jesus (Chapter 6), and the resurrection scenes from all editions (Chapter 7).
A second online data source that I used, mainly for the analysis with Marten van der Meulen of the data reported on in Chapter 5, was live.thepassion.nl: the ‘second screen application’ that, from 2014 onwards, enabled people to participate in the procession online and to share their personal motivations. From the broadcasters, I received Excel files containing all of the ‘walk-along-motivations’ from the 2014 and 2015 editions, and I used these as a secondary source (e.g. to look up keywords), supporting the research on the online processions (which were elaborated on in Chapters 3 and 5).
A third online data source was Twitter. Marten van der Meulen and I used this source in 2015 in particular, when we collected a set of data consisting of 3,500 tweets with “hashtags” #thepassion and #tp15, in order to gain insight into how the public ‘plays’ The Passion in social media. The organisation introduced these “official” hashtags via their own Twitter-account, @thepassion, in order to create a platform and encourage discussion via tweets. According to the organizers of The Passion, approximately 60,000 tweets on The Passion were sent. We used the online tool Twitter Archiver to aggregate all tweets that were sent for several hours before, during, and after the event, which contained the relevant hashtags or tagged the relevant Twitter users. We excluded all retweets, which made up a large volume of the total number of tweets but added little to the analysis. All tweets were saved in the document ‘Passion-Archiver excel-sheet’ and analysed, particularly with regard to ludic aspects in the form of jokes, that helped to understand The Passion as a ludic practice.
Entering and Exiting the Field
A final word on the process of entering and exiting the field. Considering the fact that accessibility is one of the key reasons for the success of The Passion (everyone can join the event on the square for free, and likewise everyone with a TV or access to the internet can watch the broadcast), entering the field was relatively easy. When it came to contact with different producers and broadcasters, the dynamics varied.
Production company Eye2Eye Media was a very small company where people did not always have time to talk. In 2015, the founder and director of the company welcomed me at his office and we spoke for an hour. In 2016, he also allowed me to join his team in New Orleans, where I carried out participatory observation on the procession and followed the procession production team.
From my first phone call to the broadcaster on behalf of the Roman-Catholic church, RKK, in 2011, onwards, I was warmly welcomed into the broadcaster’s office by two people who would always make time for interviews, shared information, and showed me sneak-previews of clips from the upcoming editions of The Passion. The fact that RKK was a small broadcaster was very helpful: it was easy to build a relationship of mutual trust and our communication had a spirit of openness. After RKK merged to become part of KRO-NCRV, more people were added to The Passion-team of this broadcaster, but the open character of the initial contact was extended as I was introduced to these new colleagues.
Building relationships with people at the broadcaster EO was a little more difficult since the organisation as such is larger and more hierarchically structured, and there was a higher rate of staff turnover in the production-team. This meant that there was less continuity compared to the other organising parties, and, although the management after an official meeting, allowed us to do research at EO, people who were on the job were not always aware of this. A number of them were reluctant to share information with us, because they did not know whether they were actually allowed to do so. It took more time to build a relationship of trust, and in the end, the best relationship we managed to build was with employees from the communication department (which may seem obvious, as the main task of this department is to communicate and send out information).
In meetings of the general production team (with members from all three organising parties), there was always a slight suspicion towards the researchers, possibly because members did not understand the relationship of the researchers with colleagues from the other parties, and perhaps also because of the dynamics and conflicting interests that were present among the team itself. Informal conversations with individuals afterwards often helped individual pieces of information to fall into place. It should be noted that ca. 50% of the resources for the production and broadcasting companies are provided from KRO-NCRV sources, ca. 25% from EO sources and ca. 25% from Eye2Eye sources.
Exiting the field went gradually, with decreased involvement in ethnographic research in the last two years. After completion of the manuscript and before submitting it to the publisher for production, I sent it to the production company and the broadcasting companies to give them the opportunity to check the text for factual inaccuracies and, if desired, to respond to it. None of them indicated any errors.
Jennifer Mason, Qualitative Researching (2nd edition) (London: Sage, 2002), 3.
These questions are presented as ‘six important questions’ in Jennifer Mason, Qualitative Researching (3rd edition) (Los Angeles: Sage, 2018), 3-19.
Barnard, Cilliers and Wepener, Worship in the Network Culture, 49-63 (a chapter in which I was a co-author), partly based on Klomp, The Sound of Worship, 97.
Barnard, Cilliers and Wepener, Worship in the Network Culture, 54.
Mason mentions the ethnographic approach as one example of “epistemological approaches in the social sciences and what they imply about how knowledge is derived”, Qualitative Researching (3rd ed.), 8.
Richard Osmer, “Practical theology: A current international perspective”, HTS Teologiese Studies/ Theological Studies 67, no. 2 (2011) #Art. 1058, 7 pages. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/hts.v67i2.1058.
Osmer, Practical Theology, 172.
Osmer, Practical Theology, 172.
Osmer, “Practical Theology”, 4.
Robert Yin, Case Study Research. Design and Methods (3rd ed.) (London: Sage, 2003), 1.
Yin, Case Study Research, 13.
Eileen Campbell-Reed, “The power and danger of a single case study in practical theological research”, in Conundrums, eds. Mercer and Miller- McLemore, 33-59, at 47.
Daniel Schipani, “Case Study Method”, in The Wiley-Blackwell Companion, ed. Miller-McLemore, 91-101, 91.
Parker-Jenkins, “Problematising ethnography and case study”, 24.
Parker-Jenkins, “Problematising ethnography and case study”, 23.
Parker-Jenkins, “Problematising ethnography and case study”, 25.
It is true that numerous other perspectives were possible and would have yielded other insights, e.g. perspectives focussing on popular culture, power, mediatisation, or entrepreneurship/business.
Bent Flyvbjerg, “Five Misunderstandings”, 223.
The data in this appendix are taken from the national survey GIN from 2015 (results published in 2016), which uses the LISS panel: a web survey, completed by an internet panel. The total sample included 2,197 respondents (response rate: 74%). All analyses were weighted according to the urban status of the place of residence, age and education. The (small) group of 57 supporters of non-Christian religions has not been considered, which brings the number of respondents to a total of 2,140.
Have you ever watched the TV-broadcast of The Passion (or attended the event itself)?
How do you feel about the way The Passion is organised and depicted? (for respondents who have watched at least once)
Frequency of viewing and rating classified by viewers’ characteristics
Assessment classified by social-structural characteristics (for viewers who have watched at least once)
Frequency of viewing and assessment classified by church background/affiliation
Frequency of viewing and assessment classified by the number of situations in which people consider religion to have an important role (% very or rather important)
Frequency of viewing and assessment classified by the number of situations in which they consider religion to have an important role (% very or rather important), in detail
Have you ever watched the TV-broadcast of The Passion or attended the event?
How do you feel about the way The Passion is organised and depicted?
Frequency of viewing and assessment classified by spiritual interest and practices
Frequency of viewing and assessment classified by situations in which respondents feel united with other Dutch people
Chapter 2, with kind permission from the Institute for Ritual and Liturgical Studies (PThU, Amsterdam) and DeGruijter:
Mirella Klomp, “Joseph & Jesus. Bible-based musicals and contemporary Passions staged in the public domain: an exploration of a research perspective”, Yearbook for Liturgical and Ritual Studies 27 (2011): 49-65.
Mirella Klomp and Marcel Barnard, “Sacro-Soundscapes. Interpreting Contemporary Ritual Performances of Sacred Music through the Case of The Passion in the Netherlands”, International Journal of Practical Theology 21/2 (2017), 240-258. DOI:
Chapter 3, with kind permission from Sage:
Mirella Klomp and Danie Veldsman, “After God, But Behind the Cross. The Procession as a Way to Re-encounter God in a Culture Beyond Classical Liturgy”, Studia Liturgica. An International Ecumenical Review for Liturgical Research and Renewal 47, no. 1 (2017), 15-29.
Chapter 4, with kind permission from Africa World Press:
Martin Hoondert and Mirella Klomp, “The Streets of Gouda”, in Paul Post, Philip Nel and Wouter van Beek (eds.), Sacred Spaces and Contested Identities. Space and ritual dynamics in Europe and Africa. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2014, 313-330.
Chapter 5, with kind permission from Taylor and Francis:
Mirella Klomp and Marten van der Meulen, ”The Passion as ludic practice”, Journal of Contemporary Religion 32, no. 3 (2017), 387-401. DOI:
Chapter 6, with permission from Brill:
Mirella Klomp, Marten van der Meulen, Erin Wilson and Anita Zijdemans, “The Passion as Public Reflexivity: How the Dutch in a Ritual-musical Event Reflect on Religious and Moral Discussions in Society”, Journal of Religion in Europe 11 (2018), 195-221. DOI:
Chapter 7, with permission from Brill:
Mirella Klomp, “Staging the Resurrection: The Public Theology of Dutch Production and Broadcasting Companies”. International Journal of Public Theology 9/4 (2015), 446-464.