Religion and Place

Religion and Place
Author: Peter Hopkins
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2012-09-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9400746857

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This unique collection highlights the importance of landscape, politics and piety to our understandings of religion and place. The geographies of religion have developed rapidly in the last couple of decades and this book provides both a conceptual framing of the key issues and debates involved, and rich illustrations through empirical case studies. The chapters span the discipline of human geography and cover contexts as diverse as veiling in Turkey, religious landscapes in rural Peru, and refugees and faith in South Africa. A number of prominent scholars and emerging researchers examine topical themes in each engaging chapter with significant foci being: religious transnationalism and religious landscapes; gendering of religious identities and contexts; fashion, faith and the body; identity, resistance and belief; immigrant identities, citizenship and spaces of belief; alternative spiritualities and places of retreat and enchantment. Together they make a series of important contributions that illuminate the central role of geography to the meaning and implications of lived religion, public piety and religious embodiment. As such, this collection will be of much interest to researchers and students working on topics relating to religion and place, including human geographers, sociologists, religious studies and religious education scholars.

Landscapes of the Secular

Landscapes of the Secular
Author: Nicolas Howe
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2016-09-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 022637680X

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“What does it mean to see the American landscape in a secular way?” asks Nicolas Howe at the outset of this innovative, ambitious, and wide-ranging book. It’s a surprising question because of what it implies: we usually aren’t seeing American landscapes through a non-religious lens, but rather as inflected by complicated, little-examined concepts of the sacred. Fusing geography, legal scholarship, and religion in a potent analysis, Howe shows how seemingly routine questions about how to look at a sunrise or a plateau or how to assess what a mountain is both physically and ideologically, lead to complex arguments about the nature of religious experience and its implications for our lives as citizens. In American society—nominally secular but committed to permitting a diversity of religious beliefs and expressions—such questions become all the more fraught and can lead to difficult, often unsatisfying compromises regarding how to interpret and inhabit our public lands and spaces. A serious commitment to secularism, Howe shows, forces us to confront the profound challenges of true religious diversity in ways that often will have their ultimate expression in our built environment. This provocative exploration of some of the fundamental aspects of American life will help us see the land, law, and society anew.

Religion, Culture, and Sacred Space

Religion, Culture, and Sacred Space
Author: M. Smith
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 189
Release: 2008-10-27
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0230616178

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Religion, Culture, and Sacred Spaces is a comparative exploration into the nature of the human relationship to physical space advancing the startling thesis that the human capacity for narrative and identity imbues landscapes with meaning and sacredness.

Space, Place and Religious Landscapes

Space, Place and Religious Landscapes
Author: Darrelyn Gunzburg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 288
Release: 2020-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1350079898

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Exploring sacred mountains around the world, this book examines whether bonding and reverence to a mountain is intrinsic to the mountain, constructed by people, or a mutual encounter. Chapters explore mountains in England, Scotland, Wales, Italy, Ireland, the Himalaya, Japan, Greece, USA, Asia and South America, and embrace the union of sky, landscape and people to examine the religious dynamics between human and non-human entities. This book takes as its starting point the fact that mountains physically mediate between land and sky and act as metaphors for bridges from one realm to another, recognising that mountains are relational and that landscapes form personal and group cosmologies. The book fuses ideas of space, place and material religion with cultural environmentalism and takes an interconnected approach to material religio-landscapes. In this way it fills the gap between lived religious traditions, personal reflection, phenomenology, historical context, environmental philosophy, myths and performativity. In defining material religion as active engagement with mountain-forming and humanshaping landscapes, the research and ideas presented here provide theories that are widely applicable to other forms of material religion.

Apocalyptic Geographies

Apocalyptic Geographies
Author: Jerome Tharaud
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 358
Release: 2020-10-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0691203261

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How nineteenth-century Protestant evangelicals used print and visual media to shape American culture In nineteenth-century America, "apocalypse" referred not to the end of the world but to sacred revelation, and "geography" meant both the physical landscape and its representation in printed maps, atlases, and pictures. In Apocalyptic Geographies, Jerome Tharaud explores how white Protestant evangelicals used print and visual media to present the antebellum landscape as a “sacred space” of spiritual pilgrimage, and how devotional literature influenced secular society in important and surprising ways. Reading across genres and media—including religious tracts and landscape paintings, domestic fiction and missionary memoirs, slave narratives and moving panoramas—Apocalyptic Geographies illuminates intersections of popular culture, the physical spaces of an expanding and urbanizing nation, and the spiritual narratives that ordinary Americans used to orient their lives. Placing works of literature and visual art—from Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden—into new contexts, Tharaud traces the rise of evangelical media, the controversy and backlash it engendered, and the role it played in shaping American modernity.

Layered Landscapes

Layered Landscapes
Author: Eric Nelson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 254
Release: 2017-06-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 1317107209

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This volume explores the conceptualization and construction of sacred space in a wide variety of faith traditions: Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and the religions of Japan. It deploys the notion of "layered landscapes" in order to trace the accretions of praxis and belief, the tensions between old and new devotional patterns, and the imposition of new religious ideas and behaviors on pre-existing religious landscapes in a series of carefully chosen locales: Cuzco, Edo, Geneva, Granada, Herat, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Kanchipuram, Paris, Philadelphia, Prague, and Rome. Some chapters hone in on the process of imposing novel religious beliefs, while others focus on how vestiges of displaced faiths endured. The intersection of sacred landscapes with political power, the world of ritual, and the expression of broader cultural and social identity are also examined. Crucially, the volume reveals that the creation of sacred space frequently involved more than religious buildings and was a work of historical imagination and textual expression. While a book of contrasts as much as comparisons, the volume demonstrates that vital questions about the location of the sacred and its reification in the landscape were posed by religious believers across the early-modern world.

Space, Place and Religious Landscapes

Space, Place and Religious Landscapes
Author: Darrelyn Gunzburg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2020-10-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1350079901

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Exploring sacred mountains around the world, this book examines whether bonding and reverence to a mountain is intrinsic to the mountain, constructed by people, or a mutual encounter. Chapters explore mountains in England, Scotland, Wales, Italy, Ireland, the Himalaya, Japan, Greece, USA, Asia and South America, and embrace the union of sky, landscape and people to examine the religious dynamics between human and non-human entities. This book takes as its starting point the fact that mountains physically mediate between land and sky and act as metaphors for bridges from one realm to another, recognising that mountains are relational and that landscapes form personal and group cosmologies. The book fuses ideas of space, place and material religion with cultural environmentalism and takes an interconnected approach to material religio-landscapes. In this way it fills the gap between lived religious traditions, personal reflection, phenomenology, historical context, environmental philosophy, myths and performativity. In defining material religion as active engagement with mountain-forming and humanshaping landscapes, the research and ideas presented here provide theories that are widely applicable to other forms of material religion.

The Changing World Religion Map

The Changing World Religion Map
Author: Stanley D. Brunn
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 3858
Release: 2015-02-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 940179376X

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This extensive work explores the changing world of religions, faiths and practices. It discusses a broad range of issues and phenomena that are related to religion, including nature, ethics, secularization, gender and identity. Broadening the context, it studies the interrelation between religion and other fields, including education, business, economics and law. The book presents a vast array of examples to illustrate the changes that have taken place and have led to a new world map of religions. Beginning with an introduction of the concept of the “changing world religion map”, the book first focuses on nature, ethics and the environment. It examines humankind’s eternal search for the sacred, and discusses the emergence of “green” religion as a theme that cuts across many faiths. Next, the book turns to the theme of the pilgrimage, illustrated by many examples from all parts of the world. In its discussion of the interrelation between religion and education, it looks at the role of missionary movements. It explains the relationship between religion, business, economics and law by means of a discussion of legal and moral frameworks, and the financial and business issues of religious organizations. The next part of the book explores the many “new faces” that are part of the religious landscape and culture of the Global North (Europe, Russia, Australia and New Zealand, the U.S. and Canada) and the Global South (Latin America, Africa and Asia). It does so by looking at specific population movements, diasporas, and the impact of globalization. The volume next turns to secularization as both a phenomenon occurring in the Global religious North, and as an emerging and distinguishing feature in the metropolitan, cosmopolitan and gateway cities and regions in the Global South. The final part of the book explores the changing world of religion in regards to gender and identity issues, the political/religious nexus, and the new worlds associated with the virtual technologies and visual media.

Religion, Space, and the Environment

Religion, Space, and the Environment
Author: Sigurd Bergmann
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 501
Release: 2017-07-05
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1351493655

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Religions often nurture important skills that help believers locate themselves in the world. Religious perceptions, practices, emotions, and beliefs are closely interwoven with the environments from which they emerge. Sigurd Bergmann's driving emphasis here is to explore religion not in relation to, but as a part of the spatiality and movement within the environment from which it arises and is nurtured.Religion, Space, and the Environment emerges from the author's experiences in different places and continents over the past decade. At the book's heart lie the questions of how space, place, and religion amalgamate and how lived space and lived religion influence each other.Bergmann explores how religion and the memory of our past impact our lives in urban spaces; how the sacred geographies in Mayan and northeast Asian lands compare to modern eco-spirituality; and how human images and practices of moving in, with, and through the land are interwoven with the processes of colonization and sacralising, and the practices of power and visions of the sacred, among other topics.