ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the ambiguity of place, focusing on the acute hospital, and in particular on the polysemic character of the hospital chaplaincy. The religious life of hospitals has resided primarily in the hospital chaplaincy, an institution within an institution that has developed during a period of very great social change. The chapter reviews two research projects located in acute hospitals in the North of England and which provide the ethnographic data. It describes and analyses several tensions which continue to pervade the acute hospital but which are concentrated within the chaplaincy facility itself, which is therefore a singularly ambiguous space. The chaplain as the predominant fabricator of sacred space in hospital is the embodiment of the sacred/secular tension that characterizes much of public space in modern society. Given the rapid growth of Muslim medical staff, it is hardly surprising that all hospitals have arranged to provide facilities for Islamic worship, usually in a room within the chaplaincy facility.
