Religion Culture And Sacred Space

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.

A ground‐breaking and enlightening exploration of the structures which elevate architecture to spirituality. Sacred Spaces showcases 30 of the most breath‐taking, innovative, iconic and undiscovered examples of contemporary religious architecture, including work by well‐known architects alongside emerging designers. Spanning all major religions and places of worship from intimate, reflective chapels and cemeteries to dramatic cathedrals and memorials, Sacred Spaces documents each project with lavish‐in‐depth photography and drawings and texts by James Pallister that provide a modern historical context. An inspiring collection and thorough survey, the buildings in Sacred Spaces will appeal to architects and designers as well as the general public intrigued by creative culture, religion and spirituality.

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.

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.

Are you tired of living a "formula faith" that leaves you empty, frustrated, and discouraged? We were created to experience so much more of God than most people currently do. However, too often we settle for the A + B = C approach to faith and life-which never truly meets the deep longings of the soul. We have bought into the lie that we will become spiritual people if we simply do the right spiritual things. This has crafted a works-based religious culture that fosters discouragement, disillusionment, and apathy. Sacred Space: - helps us journey deeper than bullet-point Christianity - teaches us how to unmask the shallowness and emptiness of cultural spirituality - shows us how to live connected to God If you long to uncover the secret to cultivating "God-space" amidst the busyness of life, then prepare to experience the divine movement from information towards transformation. Discover how to free your soul, moment by moment, in the midst of a frantic, noisy world. It's time to revolutionize the way you live out your faith and begin experiencing a God-saturated life-the zoe life of God-from the inside out! It's time to create some sacred space.

This collection of seven essays offers wide-ranging and in-depth studies of locations sacred to Muslims, of the histories of these sites (real or imagined), and of the ways in which Muslims and members of other religions have interacted peaceably in sacred times and spaces. The volume begins with a discussion by David Damrel of the official, hostile, Muslim attitude toward practices at shrines in South Asia. Lance Laird then presents a case study of a shrine holy to Palestinian Christians, who identify its patron as St. George, as well as to Palestinian Muslims, who believe that its patron is al Khadr. Ethel Sara Wolper illustrates how al Khadr's patronage was used also to show Muslim connections to Christian sites in Anatolia, and JoAnn Gross's essay explores oral and written traditions linking shrines in Tajikistan to traditional Muslim locations and figures. A chapter by the late Thomas Sizgorich examines how Christian and Muslim authors used monastic settings to reimagine the relationship between the two religions, and Alexandra Cuffel offers a study of attitudes towards the mixing of religious groups in religious festivals in eleventh- to sixteenth-century Egypt. Finally, Eric Ross shows how the Layenne Sufi order incorporates a singular combination of Christian and Muslim figures and festivals in its history and practices. Muslims and Others in Sacred Space will be an invaluable resource to anyone interested in the complex meanings of sacred sites in Muslim history.

When the Bolsheviks set out to build a new world in the wake of the Russian Revolution, they expected religion to die off. Soviet power used a variety of tools--from education to propaganda to terror—to turn its vision of a Communist world without religion into reality. Yet even with its monopoly on ideology and power, the Soviet Communist Party never succeeded in overcoming religion and creating an atheist society. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty presents the first history of Soviet atheism from the 1917 revolution to the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. Drawing on a wealth of archival material and in-depth interviews with those who were on the front lines of Communist ideological campaigns, Victoria Smolkin argues that to understand the Soviet experiment, we must make sense of Soviet atheism. Smolkin shows how atheism was reimagined as an alternative cosmology with its own set of positive beliefs, practices, and spiritual commitments. Through its engagements with religion, the Soviet leadership realized that removing religion from the "sacred spaces" of Soviet life was not enough. Then, in the final years of the Soviet experiment, Mikhail Gorbachev—in a stunning and unexpected reversal—abandoned atheism and reintroduced religion into Soviet public life. A Sacred Space Is Never Empty explores the meaning of atheism for religious life, for Communist ideology, and for Soviet politics.