The Sacred Center

Machu Picchu, recently voted one of the New Wonders of the World, is one of the world's most famous archaeological sites, yet it remains a mystery. Even the most basic questions are still unanswered: What was its meaning and why was it built in such a difficult location? Renowned explorer Johan Reinhard attempts to answer such elusive questions from the perspectives of sacred landscape and archaeoastronomy. Using information gathered from historical, archaeological, and ethnographical sources, Reinhard demonstrates how the site is situated in the center of sacred mountains and associated with a sacred river, which is in turn symbolically linked with the sun's passage. Taken together, these features meant that Machu Picchu formed a cosmological, hydrological, and sacred geological center for a vast region.

The symbolism and power behind sacred locations in ancient and modern times • Explains the need and role for ritual centers in modern society • Examines ancient territorial centers in ancient Egypt, Greece, Africa and Asia, and Iceland and the British Isles • Reveals the code of number and geometry behind the idealistic social structure of the ritual center, formed to imitate the heavenly order Symbols of ritual centers are among the most persistent elements of myth and belief between cultures widely separated in time and space. Every tribe and state had its “generation center,” a sacred area within its heartland where its legendary founders gave birth to its people and established their laws. Within the inner sanctum of the sanctuary was an altar or pillar, the omphalos or navel stone, that marked the midpoint of the home territory and represented the world-pole on which everything revolved. It was the focus of a perpetual cycle of rituals and festivals that passed with the seasons around the country and held its people under the spell of a golden age. In this book John Michell reveals the precise methods by which the ancients located the appropriate centers and adopted them as sanctuaries. The same principles of ritual geography in the siting of Akhenaten’s capital in Egypt and Megalopolis in classical Greece apply also to the traditional centers of small territories and islands. The rediscovery of these sites--such as the spot at the center of Ireland where the Celtic High Kings were installed--sheds new light on the ritualized order of prehistoric societies and the sacred, scientific code on which they were founded. These revelations from the distant past are of great significance in present times, for in them are the secrets of harmony on every scale, from the personal to the universal. Restoring the sacred center to its former place of prominence offers the possibility of a renaissance of human culture, ideally centered upon the image of a perfectly ordered Cosmos.

It was January 1990, the dawn of a new decade and Henri Nouwen, world-renoweded spiritual writer, was in France but his writing wasn't going well. Frustrated and discouraged, he decided to go to Lourdes, even though it was the "off season," to give his "anxious heart a rest." This profoundly inspiring journal is the result of his three-day stay. Lourdes restored Nouwen's inner peace and helped him return to his sacred center. He realized, of course, that he did not need to be at Lourdes to find peace and joy. The purity, simplicity, and freedom he experienced "belong to the heart and can be lived anywhere." Whether we have been to Lourdes or not, does not matter. This small journal is bound to touch our own restless and searching hearts and help us to find again our own sacred center, the living Christ within us.

This collection of quotations of women's spiritual wisdom comes from the best of ten years of lectures at the College of St. Catherine in Saint Paul, Minnesota. If there is anything worth calling theology, said one of the presenters, it is listening to people's stories, listening to them and cherishing them. Streams From The Sacred River contains stories from women willing to share their doubts, fears, successes, inspiration and wisdom.

This substantially expanded edition of Belden C. Lane's Landscapes of the Sacred includes a new introductory chapter that offers three new interpretive models for understanding American sacred space. Lane maintains his approach of interspersing shorter and more personal pieces among full-length essays that explore how Native American, early French and Spanish, Puritan New England, and Catholic Worker traditions has each expressed the connection between spirituality and place. A new section at the end of the book includes three chapters that address methodological issues in the study of spirituality, the symbol-making process of religious experience, and the tension between place and placelessness in Christian spirituality.

This book represents the first comprehensive application to the whole Bible of RenŽ Girard's theories on violence, civilization, and religion.

Both parts of this book -- the homily on Mary and the journal of Henri Nouwen's pilgrimage to Lourdes -- deal with his insights into his relationship with Jesus and Mary. Mary is his "gentle guide" who takes him by the hand and leads him into deeper union with her son. Nouwen invites us to find our inner child and rid ourselves of the "false adulthood" of our times.