Chicago Sacred Initiative

The Chicago History Museum’s Chicago Sacred Initiative uplifts the city’s richly diverse and underrepresented spiritual, sacred, and community histories. It provides the public with ongoing accurate and authentic illustrations of the central role of religion in shaping Chicago history and culture.

Our approach to religion is built on a foundation of three pillars:

Collaborating with communities

Learning the history of religion in cities

Fostering understanding of different religions

THE COMMUNITY

The National Conference of Christians and Jews holds an Interfaith Thanksgiving Service

Working with communities

Our approach to community-led work is centered on shared authority, reflective practice, anti-racism, and trauma-informed work. We bring awareness of white privilege and Christian normativity and aim to serve as a listening institution, hearing and sharing stories of Chicagoland’s diverse faith communities.

THE HISTORY

Historicizing religion in the urban context

We approach this through four critical points: that religion is central to Chicagoland’s history and should be contextualized, not exoticized nor essentialized; Chicago’s history can serve as a lens for understanding American religious history as a whole; urban religion is an important and distinct category of religion. Rooting religion in cities helps us understand racially complex histories; and religion is much bigger and broader than singular faith traditions, and we look to cross-cultural and cross-geographic ways of understanding community interactions across time and boundaries of traditions.

Rejected design drawing for interior of St. Clement Church

This work includes:

  • Ongoing collections inventory and processing, including reparative metadata and critical cataloguing around identity-based terms and provenance (currently working on architecture and built environment collections)
  • Increasing digital access, scholarship, and awareness around religious and community collections
  • Diversifying community representation in collections and archives
  • Internships and research fellowship opportunities, including the Lilly Collections Fellow in reparative inventorying of sacred collections
  • Community collections workshops for caring for material and intangible heritages
  • Growing in-house educational initiatives to support the development of strong allies among the board, staff, volunteers, and members of CHM
  • Programs and events that enhances the public understanding of religion
  • Exhibitions and interpretation on religious and community themes
  • Community-led oral history projects and trainings in collaboration with the Studs Terkel Center for Oral History
  • Digital scholarship and publications

THE WORK

Related Exhibitions

Exhibition-Fifth Star Challenge-floor map
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