T. R. Hummer says that "Stephen Haven is a poet of incisive discipline deployed in the service of a passionate humanistic ethos. Every word in this collection reflects concern: concern for humanity, and concern for language, humanity's best hope. Global in vision, this worried book is unflinching, yet hopeful, yielding up a world in which 'Your own caesurae, / Your own circumference, / Is the shell of a missing animal. / You pull it tight around you like a cloak. . . . '

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.

At the dawn of the 1990 autumn equinox, Courtney Milne climbed into the bucket of a hydraulic lift and was hoisted forty feet into the air beside the Big Horn Medicine Wheel in northern Wyoming. From that perspective, it seemed to him as though the Big Horn wheel linked the distant plains with the heavens. And so, the wheel became the starting point of his photographic journey as he followed each spoke across the continent in search of sacred landscapes.

World travelers and armchair tourists who want to explore the mythology and archaeology of the ruins, sanctuaries, mountains, lost cities, and temples of ancient civilizations will find this guide ideal. Detailed here are the monuments and sites where ancient peoples once gathered to perform sacred rituals and ceremonies to worship various gods and to achieve spiritual enlightenment. Important archaeological, historical, and geological destinations worldwide are profiled, from the Great Pyramid in Egypt and the Forbidden City in China to the Temples of Angkor in Cambodia and Mount Shasta in California. Sites are described in historical and cultural context, and practical contemporary travel information is provided, including detailed maps, drawings, photographs, and travel directions.

This revised and updated comprehensive travel guide examines North America's most sacred sites for spiritually attuned explorers. Important archaeological, geological, and historical destinations from coast to coast are exhaustively examined, from the weathered pueblos of the American Southwest and the medicine wheels of western Canada to Graceland and the birthplace of Martin Luther King, Jr. Histories and cultural contexts are objectively surveyed, along with the latest academic theories and insightful metaphysical ruminations. Detailed maps, drawings, and travel directions are also included.

A compilation of 108 spiritual destinations around North America-- medicine wheels, rock art, modern pilgrimage routes, prehistoric earthen pyramids, ancient stone structures, monasteries, shrines, temples, and more.

From the author of How the World Moves: A revelatory new look at the hallowed, diverse, and threatened landscapes of the American Indian For thousands of years , Native Americans have told stories about the powers of revered landscapes and sought spiritual direction at mysterious places in their homelands. In this important book, respected scholar and anthropologist Peter Nabokov writes of a wide range of sacred places in Native America. From the “high country” of California to Tennessee’s Tellico Valley, from the Black Hills of South Dakota to Rainbow Canyon in Arizona, each chapter delves into the relationship between Indian cultures and their environments and describes the myths and legends, practices, and rituals that sustained them.