Are Roadside Crosses in Poland a Religious or Cultural Expression?

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

see attachment 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

I am grateful for your comments. I followed your advice. Firstly, I have incorporated the secular-religious divide theme into Introduction and Discussion. Secondly, I  have reduced the text you indicated (lines 338-378 have been erased) to make space for discussion on the results in the light of the abovementioned division. I appreciate your suggestion and I will use the erased text as a starting point for another article. However, I have not erased the whole section you suggested (lines 338-415).  I have left the conclusions drawn after confronting earlier research results with the results of the public perception study, presented in this article. I believe they are essential for the structure of the paper. As stated in Introduction (lines 62-68; lines 74-80 in a revised version of my manuscript), the article sums up a three-year-long research project on  memorial crosses in Poland. Thus, the conclusions concerning the meaning of the roadside cross, based on a survey and presented in this article, have been interpolated with the author's earlier conclusions.  

I hope you will be satisfied with a revised version of the manuscript.

Best regards,

Author

Reviewer 2 Report

The colon in your thesis question ": or both, religious and cultural?" isn't quite grammatically necessary and it highlights that the question you ask is one that many cultural theologians (starting with Tillich's work, explicitly) has been done often. The presumed answer to the question, which you bury in 58-61 in terms of "a relationship," is that the terms themselves are part of an artificial and false binary that presumes that the religious and cultural could be extracted. The whole of the introduction seems thus a bit under thought and narrow. The better alternative would be to build on your strengths and be as explicit about the depth to which the question of cultural/religious has been asked as you are concerning the specific occurrence of roadside crosses. 62-68 also sacrifices a clear and innovative conclusion in favor of pointing to the fact of field work and research. If you are not presenting an innovative conclusion, be honest and direct with what you have: "Three years of field work suggest that roadside classes are consistent with other artifacts that designate significant and liminal events in human life through markers that can be interpreted as cultural and religious." 

Section 2 provides the work of detailing methods in a way that reveals the narrow focus of the project.  

Section 3 begins by showing the confusion at the heart of the question, presupposing that people (researchers and those leaving memorials) are self-aware of the limits of cultural/religious intentionality. 123-125 seems difficult to parse relative to the phrase "common use...with clear Christian religious intent." Does this refer to a desire to use the markers to evangelize? What defines "religious intent" in this regard--both in terms of the Romanian study and in terms of other studies that may have asked different questions but whose conclusions would show some "religious intent." 

136-154 show the problem with making general, statistical statements about the US. Pockets of the US, especially rural Red states, would provide a very different set of answers. The "US" is not particularly homogenous in this regard, and any even provisional conclusion seems misleading. I would suspect that the same might be true of Poland, also, although it may be that US history and geography have allowed for an exacerbation of this tendency. 

155-178 shows where some of the battles/misunderstandings are situated at a cultural level. Problematically, many of these legal battles simply reassert the same initial confusion of religion/culture that you're studying and are difficult to use as evidence of anything beyond confusion. But lawsuits and public organizations like MADD are also not quite venues for true individual religious significance/meaning. 

180: This information--the mass produced Polish crosses--needs to go into the introduction as a reason for studying Poland in particular.

242-251: This suggests how the question "religious or cultural" creates a false binary that presupposes a weak or over limited view of "religious" as designating only officially validated forms of confessional expression. 

252: This difficulty is expressed in your non-paradoxical "paradox." The problem isn't actually a paradox but a poorly formed both/and binary statement. 

The results section isn't bad, but it merely repeats the lack of clarity presented both in the general culture and in the framing of this study. It establishes that people tend to assume that the cross has at least more cultural/religious value to others than it has to the respondent, which would make sense given that the phenomenon is more widespread than simply the respondent--so it clearly has either religious or cultural value, or both. The "or both" factors in awareness that not all people have the same intention with using mass manufactured crosses for the event, so that its use is not exclusive to religion. It doesn't, in other words, really substantiate much beyond the framing of the question. It isn't bad to establish this in a survey form and the consistency of cross use in home/belief in god is also fine to establish. But nothing surprising seems to be revealed with all of this. 

 

334-402: There's a lot of repetition without a lot of new insight in the discussion.

412-415: This seems to establish that people generalize their own belief system when discussing motivations for others. This doesn't seem to add much to the working knowledge on the topic. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

I appreciate the detailed comments on my manuscript.

I agree that my paper and project on roadside memorials can be perceived as narrow, to some extent. Generally speaking, my intention is to present conclusions concerning the meaning of the roadside cross, based on a representative poll, interpolated with my earlier conclusions, which  has been clearly stated in Introduction (lines 62-65). My paper is an empirical one. Although I have studied geography and theology, I do my research from an empirical perspective.  I am not good at theological dispute.

Both you and Reviewer 1 found incoherency in my research questions. Thus, I decided to solve the problem by following Reviewer 1's advice to use the divide between secular and religious as  the theoretical foundation of the article. I incorporated Eliade`s sacred/profane concept into my paper.

Lines 123-125

In contrast to world literature, the study of Romanian memorial crosses (Stahl 2013) clearly suggests the religious motivation of erecting roadside crosses at the sites of fatal accidents. The conclusion was based both on field inventory and interviews with several  people (priests  and memorial builders).  Unfortunately, we do not know the questions the Romanian researcher asked. Neither the Romanian researcher nor others mention the desire to use memorial crosses to evangelize.

Lines 136-154

I agree that making general, statistical statements about American memorial crosses is not possible. The literature review on roadside crosses in the US supports this statement (section No 3). My previous research on spatial differentiation of memorial crosses in Poland proves they are ubiquitous. They are popular in the north and in the south, in the west and in the east. However, their distribution differs, depending on the road category: they are more common at national roads and less frequently seen on communal roads. It is related to traffic.

Lines 155-178

I mentioned MADD crosses exclusively to illustrate that roadside crosses also raise controversy and  confusion.

Line 180

I followed the advice to include the mass-produced Polish crosses as a reason for studying Poland in particular. A new sentence has been added into Introduction (lines 77-78).

Lines 334-402:

I  have reduced Conclusions (lines 338-378 have been erased). I have left the conclusions drawn after confronting earlier research results with the results of the public perception study, presented in this article. I believe they are essential for the structure of the paper. As stated in Introduction (lines 62-68), the article sums up a three-year-long research project on  memorial crosses in Poland. Thus, the conclusions concerning the meaning of the roadside cross, based on a survey and presented in this article, have been interpolated with the author's earlier conclusions.

Lines 412-415:

The uniqueness of my paper lies in the inclusion of a representative public opinion poll, into the roadside memorials topic. The study is an empirical one. It focuses on statistics to prove that there is a relationship between one's declaration of faith and their perception of memorial crosses.

I hope you will be satisfied with my responses.

Your sincerely,

Author

Reviewer 3 Report

The author has excellently summarized the main discourse of this article. The survey results scientifically prove that the Polish people consider the road-side crosses important part of their memory associated with the dead people who met with fatal accidents on the road. Poland has a very unique historical and cultural place in Europe, which makes this study all the more interesting.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

I am grateful  for your comments.

I agree that the Polish case is unique.

Thank you very much.

Best regards,

Author

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

no comments

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.