Loci sacri arises from an international colloquium held in Leuven in 2007 in connection with a European project on ‘Herbestemming van Religiues Erfgoed/ Converting Sacred Places’. Timed to coincide with discussions about the future of the city's twelfth-century Norbertine abbey, it brought together scholars from the Netherlands, Belgium, Canada and the United States to consider the concept of the sacred place and the ways in which it has changed over time. The essays that comprise this volume of selected conference proceedings approach the topic from many different perspectives and disciplinary positions: theology and religion, architectural history, philosophy, sociology, literature, archaeology, anthropology and urban and tourist studies. The result is a somewhat eclectic but none the less stimulating collection of reflections on the ‘restless logic of sacred space’ (p. 9) that range chronologically from the medieval era to the contemporary world. Focusing largely on Christianity in Western Europe and North America, the essays are organised loosely under three headings: the first set explores typologies and concepts of sacred space; the second examines particular sites and the structures of belief and behaviour that make them ‘sacred’; and the third group, the reuse and reconstitution of formerly sanctified spaces for utilitarian purposes and as forms of heritage once their original religious functions have ceased. Insofar as the editors define ‘sacred space’, they do so very capaciously, describing it simply as a place set apart, an autonomous entity situated outside normal time and the conventional parameters of geographical location. Other contributors are equally expansive: David Bell stresses that holiness like beauty lies in the eye of the beholder and urges scholars to avoid the danger of superimposing modern ideas about the nature of sanctity and spirituality onto the past. For Charles Caspars a sacred place may have no clear connection with specifically religious frames of reference; it may be an object of devotion in the absence of formal liturgical devotions. This theme is also underlined by Liliane Voyé, who deploys the notion of ‘secondarity’ to denote the ongoing pursuit of locations where people can free their minds from the constraints of work, home and everyday life, despite the decline of the Churches since the 1960s. Such places are sacred in the sense that they provide the opportunity for ‘spiritual’ experiences, albeit ones often detached from institutional religion. There remains room only to highlight a few of the more striking contributions to this volume. Paul Vandenbroek contributes an interesting essay on the syncretism of indigenous and Christian religion at natural sites in the Canary Islands, where the cults of the Virgin del pino and other madonnas testify, in his view, to the persistence of an animistic piety of the landscape combined with feminine or ‘matrixial’ energies. Lindsay Jones charts the surprisingly slow process by which the archaeological-tourist site of Monte Albán, Oaxaca, Mexico, the ruined capital of the ancient Zaopotec empire, has acquired its reputation for sacrality. Far from a site of traditional reverence, its status as a sacred site is in large part the product of modern national consciousness and ‘neo-colonial cultural theft’. The final essay, by Nic Noppen and Lucie K. Morisset, sheds new light on attitudes to the reuse of redundant church buildings in the United States and Quebec, where such structures continue to perform a symbolic function in the collective imagination, reflecting what Thomas Coomans calls the ‘new sanctity of culture’ in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Loci sacri is thus a collection that pulls in several directions and which struggles to find real coherence. Perhaps the most important insight that emerges cumulatively from the essays that comprise it is the idea that sanctity and spirituality have themselves become secular categories.