African Sacred Spaces

This book focuses on space in African and Black religion and spirituality through the lenses of area studies, African and black diaspora studies, history and culture, cultural studies, ecotourism, environmentalism, and sustainability.

This book focuses on space in African and Black religion and spirituality through the lenses of area studies, African and black diaspora studies, history and culture, cultural studies, ecotourism, environmentalism, and sustainability.

How do Africans conceive space? How are places constructed and imagined? How do the conceptions, constructions, imaginings of spaces and places affect, and in turn are affected by, social, economic and political change. These are some of the questions answered in this, the first book of its kind to address systematically the themes of of space and spatiality.

Looks at the history of African religion and its basic beliefs, discussing oral tradition, rituals, sacred spaces and places, mystical forces, and how it is practiced today.

This volume examines a diverse set of spaces and buildings seen through the lens of popular practice and belief to shed light on the complexities of sacred space in America. Contributors explore how dedication sermons document shifting understandings of the meetinghouse in early 19th-century Connecticut; the changes in evangelical church architecture during the same century and what that tells us about evangelical religious life; the impact of contemporary issues on Catholic church architecture; the impact of globalization on the construction of traditional sacred spaces; the urban practice of Jewish space; nature worship and Central Park in New York; the mezuzah and domestic sacred space; and, finally, the spiritual aspects of African American yard art.

A study of pilgrimage to the Njelele shrine - a major centre of the Mwali cult, South Africa's cult of the High God. The study mainly delineates the importance of sacred spaces as central places for nodally organised cults, raising questions of intermediaries between the High God and the various congregations lying in the vast cult domain; the relationship between oracular cult centres and low-level shrines and affiliated congregations; the nature and volume of traffic of pilgrims between cardinal shrines; and the symbolic exchange implied in pilgrimage tradition.

In a series of pioneering studies, this book examines the creation—and the conflict behind the creation—of sacred space in America. The essays in this volume visit places in America where economic, political, and social forces clash over the sacred and the profane, from wilderness areas in the American West to the Mall in Washington, D.C., and they investigate visions of America as sacred space at home and abroad. Here are the beginnings of a new American religious history—told as the story of the contested spaces it has inhabited. The contributors are David Chidester, Matthew Glass, Edward T. Linenthal, Colleen McDannell, Robert S. Michaelsen, Rowland A. Sherrill, and Bron Taylor.