Promising Images of Love: Religion, Norms, and the Mediatisation of Weddings

A couple in love, a white dress with veil, a ritual with flowers and a vow: these are some of the images that we link to weddings. But why do we have these ideas regarding weddings? Our imaginations are strongly influenced by different media, such as novels, newspaper articles, films, TV series, images, social media reels, etc. In these media, the ideal wedding is staged, debated and constructed. The actual wedding rituals are as diverse as each cultural-religious context and individual, and underlie complex processes of change, adaptation, tradition and innovation. On a theoretical level, we can link rites of passage with the symbolic transformation of the social status of the individuals-the wedding couple. In the context of the ritual, the everyday world is transcended and socially changed. The basic categories of a society, such as family, gender, status, age, are thereby expressed and formed. This reprint focusses on the interrelations between weddings as rites of passage, their link to religious traditions, their mediatisation and the values as well as norms connected with them. Values and norms in wedding practices are numerous, complex, and interlinked on several levels, notably social, political, cultural, historical, and economic. The papers in this reprint explore this complexity from different perspectives, and the reprint itself presents a dialogue between approaches towards philosophical, historical, sociological and religious studies.