A world travel to religious and spiritual sites. The book invites readers to embark on a spiritual journey through the history and the cultures of the world.

A unique and highly accessible anthology of the best in classical and contemporary thought on the phenomenonology of religion.

Experiences of the Sacred: Introductory Readings in Religion provides students with a curated compilation of articles written on the different religious traditions. The articles provide students with valuable insight into the particular worldviews and beliefs of each religion. The text provides an overview of seven religious traditions, which are organized into three major categories: Dharmic traditions (Hinduism and Buddhism); Chinese traditions (Confucianism and Daoism); and Abrahamic traditions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam). The readings on the religions are introduced by material on the cultures in which they were created, providing students with rich historical and cultural context, followed by overviews, essays, and descriptions of each tradition. Suggestions for further reading and reflection questions throughout the text encourage additional exploration and consideration of the material. Providing students with a critical knowledge base of major religious traditions, Experiences of the Sacred is an ideal textbook for foundational courses in world religion.

Supporting Lovelock's thesis that the Earth is a living being, Swan suggests natural sites such as Serpent Mound, Machu Pichu, and Kilauea Center have the power to move us in ways modern science cannot explain.

In this book, a distinguished team of authors explores the way space, place, architecture, and ritual interact to construct sacred experience in the historical cultures of the eastern Mediterranean. Essays address fundamental issues and features that enable buildings to perform as spiritually transformative spaces in ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, early Christian, and Byzantine civilizations. Collectively they demonstrate the multiple ways in which works of architecture and their settings were active agents in the ritual process. Architecture did not merely host events; rather, it magnified and elevated them, interacting with rituals facilitating the construction of ceremony. This book examines comparatively the ways in which ideas and situations generated by the interaction of place, built environment, ritual action, and memory contributed to the cultural formulation of the sacred experience in different religious faiths.

The sacred place was, and still is, an intermediate zone created in the belief that it has the ability to co-join the religious aspirants to their gods. An essential means of understanding this sacred architecture is through the recognition of its role as an ‘in-between’ place. Establishing the contexts, approaches and understandings of architecture through the lens of the mediating roles often performed by sacred architecture, this book offers the reader an extraordinary insight into the forces behind these extraordinary buildings. Written by a well-known expert in the field, the book draws on a unique range of cases, reflecting on these inspiring places, their continuing ontological significance and the lessons they can offer today. Fascinating reading for anyone interested in sacred architecture.