ABSTRACT
The Religious Society of Friends (Quakers) claim that every individual can have a personal unmediated experience of God. It is this experience that guides, informs and motivates them and on which they base their actions, both individually and corporately. In 1995, the author had what might be termed a ‘spiritual emergency’ of the kind well documented by past Quakers and indeed by many other religious groups. He was also concerned about those Quakers who had experienced the reality of God in their lives, and who were becoming increasingly unable to ‘own’ this, even privately. Heterotopia was originally a word used by anatomists to refer to those parts of the body which were out of place, missing altogether, extra or alien; features which were unexpected, incongruous and unsettling. Heterotopias, or sites of Otherness, express their alternate ordering of society directly through the society from whom they seek to be different.
