Welcome to the Meadville Lombard Week! It will be a week of daily events to experience what it’s like to be in the remarkable ML Community.

Mini Lecture by Dr. Nicole Kirk

Wanamaker's Temple: Creating Sacred Space in a Department Store

Remembered for his enormous Philadelphia department store at 13th and Market Street, John Wanamaker helped to shape the American retail shopping experience. Wanamaker was also a prominent Christian leader. From the YMCA to the Sunday school and temperance movements, he participated in the major Protestant moral reform movements of the era. But most notably, he extended his religious work to his department store by infusing the developing commercial culture with new meaning. Wanamaker created religious spaces in his store that challenged the privatization of religion to church and home. In this lecture, Dr. Kirk offers a historical exploration of the intersections of commerce and religion in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century by examining Wanamaker’s Christmas and Easter store displays and programs in the Grand Court of his Philadelphia store.

Dr. Nicole Kirk is a historian of American religious history, and our Associate Professor, Rev. Dr. J. Frank and Alice Schulman Chair in Unitarian Universalist History.