Download or read book Religion Culture and Sacred Space written by M. Smith and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-10-27 with total page 189 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book American Sacred Space written by David Chidester and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 1995-11-22 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Confucianism and Sacred Space written by Chin-shing Huang and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-01 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Temples dedicated to Confucius are found throughout China and across East Asia, dating back over two thousand years. These sacred and magnificent sanctuaries hold deep cultural and political significance. This book brings together studies from Chin-shing Huang’s decades-long research into Confucius temples that individually and collectively consider Confucianism as religion. Huang uses the Confucius temple to explore Confucianism both as one of China’s “three religions” (with Buddhism and Daoism) and as a cultural phenomenon, from the early imperial era through the present day. He argues for viewing Confucius temples as the holy ground of Confucianism, symbolic sites of sacred space that represent a point of convergence between political and cultural power. Their complex histories shed light on the religious nature and character of Confucianism and its status as official religion in imperial China. Huang examines topics such as the political and intellectual elements of Confucian enshrinement, how Confucius temples were brought into the imperial ritual system from the Tang dynasty onward, and why modern Chinese largely do not think of Confucianism as a religion. A nuanced analysis of the question of Confucianism as religion, Confucianism and Sacred Space offers keen insights into Confucius temples and their significance in the intertwined intellectual, political, social, and religious histories of imperial China.
Download or read book Sacred Spaces written by James Pallister and published by Phaidon Press. This book was released on 2015-04-20 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Sacred Spaces written by Samina Quraeshi and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2010-03-31 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Quraeshi provides a vision of Islam in South Asia enriched by art and by a female perspective on the diversity of Islamic expressions of faith. An account of a journey through the author’s childhood homeland, the book reveals the deeply spiritual nature of major centers of Sufism in the central and northwestern heartlands of South Asia.
Download or read book African Sacred Spaces written by 'BioDun J. Ogundayo and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-02-06 with total page 269 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African Sacred Spaces: Culture, History, and Change is a collection of carefully and analytically written essays on different aspects of African sacred spaces. The interaction between the past and present points to Africans’ continuing recognition of certain natural phenomena and places as sacred. Western influence, the introduction of Christianity and Islam, as well as modernity, have not succeeded in completely obliterating African spirituality and sacred observances, especially as these relate to space in its various iterations. Indeed, Africans, on the continent and in the Diasporas, have responded to the challenges of history, environmentalism, and sustainability with sober and versatile responses in their reverence for sacred space as expressed through a variety of religious, historical, and spiritual practices, as this volume attempts to show.
Download or read book Sacred Power Sacred Space written by Jeanne Halgren Kilde and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2008-07-21 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeanne Halgren Kilde's survey of church architecture is unlike any other. Her main concern is not the buildings themselves, but rather the dynamic character of Christianity and how church buildings shape and influence the religion. Kilde argues that a primary function of church buildings is to represent and reify three different types of power: divine power, or ideas about God; personal empowerment as manifested in the individual's perceived relationship to the divine; and social power, meaning the relationships between groups such as clergy and laity. Each type intersects with notions of Christian creed, cult, and code, and is represented spatially and materially in church buildings. Kilde explores these categories chronologically, from the early church to the twentieth century. She considers the form, organization, and use of worship rooms; the location of churches; and the interaction between churches and the wider culture. Church buildings have been integral to Christianity, and Kilde's important study sheds new light on the way they impact all aspects of the religion. Neither mere witnesses to transformations of religious thought or nor simple backgrounds for religious practice, church buildings are, in Kilde's view, dynamic participants in religious change and goldmines of information on Christianity itself.
Download or read book Sacred Space written by Monty Wright and published by TrustedBooks. This book was released on 2014-04-15 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book A Sacred Space Is Never Empty written by Victoria Smolkin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-10-29 with total page 360 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Sacred Space in Early Modern Europe written by Will Coster and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2005-07-28 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this 2005 book, leading historians examine sanctity and sacred space in Europe during and after the religious upheavals of the early modern period.
Download or read book Secular Music Sacred Space written by April Stace and published by Lexington Books. This book was released on 2017-06-13 with total page 134 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Easter Sunday, 2009, was the Sunday heard ‘round the evangelical internet: NewSpring Church, the second-largest church in the Southern Baptist Convention and among the top one hundred largest churches in the US, had begun their service with the song “Highway to Hell” by hard rock band AC/DC. They had brazenly crossed the sacred/secular musical divide on the most important Sunday of the year, and commentary abounded on the value of such a step. Many were offended at the “desecration” of such a holy day, deriding Newspring as the “theater of the absurd.” Others cheered NewSpring’s engagement with “the culture” and suggested that music could be used to convert non-Christians. No mere debate over stylistic preferences, many expressed that foundational aspects of evangelical identity were at stake. While many books have been written about religious music that utilizes popular music styles (a.k.a. “contemporary Christian music”), there has yet to be a scholarly treatment of how and why popular, secular music is utilized by churches. This book addresses that lacuna by examining this emerging trend in evangelical and “emerging” churches in America. What is the motivation behind using music that seemingly has no connection to Christian theology, values, or themes—such as music by Katy Perry, AC/DC, or Van Halen—and what can we learn about post-denominational evangelical churches in America by uncovering these motives? In this book, April Stace uncovers several themes from an ethnographic study of these churches: the increasingly-porous boundary between the sacred and the secular, the importance placed on “authenticity” in contemporary American culture, how evangelicals are responding to what they perceive is an increasingly-secular society, the “turn to the subject” of contemporary culture, the desire to leave a space for expression of doubt in the worship service without fully authorizing that doubt, and the individualization of the construction of religious identity in the modern era.
Download or read book Muslims and Others in Sacred Space written by Margaret Cormack and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Choreographies of Shared Sacred Sites written by Elazar Barkan and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-11-11 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This anthology explores the dynamics of shared religious sites in Turkey, the Balkans, Palestine/Israel, Cyprus, and Algeria, indicating where local and national stakeholders maneuver between competition and cooperation, coexistence and conflict. Contributors probe the notion of coexistence and the logic that underlies centuries of "sharing," exploring when and why sharing gets interrupted—or not—by conflict, and the policy consequences. These essays map the choreographies of shared sacred spaces within the framework of state-society relations, juxtaposing a site's political and religious features and exploring whether sharing or contestation is primarily religious or politically motivated. Although religion and politics are intertwined phenomena, the contributors to this volume understand the category of "religion" and the "political" as devices meant to distinguish between the theological and confessional aspects of religion and the political goals of groups. Their comparative approach better represents the transition in some cases of sites into places of hatred and violence, while in other instances they remain noncontroversial. The essays clearly delineate the religious and political factors that contribute to the context and causality of conflict at these sites and draw on history and anthropology to shed light on the often rapid switch from relative tolerance to distress to peace and calm.
Download or read book The Sacred and the Profane written by Mircea Eliade and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 1959 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Famed historian of religion Mircea Eliade observes that even moderns who proclaim themselves residents of a completely profane world are still unconsciously nourished by the memory of the sacred. Eliade traces manifestations of the sacred from primitive to modern times in terms of space, time, nature, and the cosmos. In doing so he shows how the total human experience of the religious man compares with that of the nonreligious. This book serves as an excellent introduction to the history of religion, but its perspective also emcompasses philosophical anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology. It will appeal to anyone seeking to discover the potential dimensions of human existence. -- P. [4] of cover.
Download or read book Sacred Places Sacred Spaces written by Robert H. Stoddard and published by Geoscience Publications, Louisiana State University. This book was released on 1997 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Nature Space and the Sacred written by S. Bergmann and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-12-05 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nature, Space and the Sacred offers the first investigative mapping of a new and highly significant agenda: the spatial interactions between religion, nature and culture. In this ground-breaking work, different concepts of religion, theology, space and place and their internal relations are discussed in an impressive range of approaches. Weaving together a diversity of perspectives, this book presents an innovative and truly transdisciplinary environmental science. Its broad range offers a rich exchange of insights, methods and theoretical engagements.
Download or read book Landscapes of the Secular written by Nicolas Howe and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2016-09-05 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “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.