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.

Torgerson begins by discussing God's transcendence and immanence and showing how church architecture has traditionally interpreted these key concepts. He then traces the theological roots of immanence's priority from liberal theology and liturgical innovation to modern architecture. Next, Torgerson illustrates this new architecture of immanence through particular practitioners, focusing especially on the work of theologically savvy architect Edward Anders Sövik. Finally, he addresses the future of church architecture as congregations are buffeted by the twin forces of liturgical change and postmodernism.

This volume examines a diverse set of spaces and buildings seen through the lens of popular practice and belief to shed light on the complexities of sacred space in America. Contributors explore how dedication sermons document shifting understandings of the meetinghouse in early 19th-century Connecticut; the changes in evangelical church architecture during the same century and what that tells us about evangelical religious life; the impact of contemporary issues on Catholic church architecture; the impact of globalization on the construction of traditional sacred spaces; the urban practice of Jewish space; nature worship and Central Park in New York; the mezuzah and domestic sacred space; and, finally, the spiritual aspects of African American yard art.

The editors and contributors to this pioneering volume have focused the lense of geography on new territory as they inquire critically into the spatial dimensions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, making this interdisciplinary project truly a new idea in the study of comparative religion and human geography. Editors Jamie Scott and Paul Simpson-Housley have organized the study into three broad areas of inquiry and have coined the term Geographics to encompass the three distinct yet interrelated spatial dimensions implicated in the study of religion. The first area concerns the literal role played by specific sites, regions, or geographical phenomena in the development of the three religions. The focus here is on city, wilderness, river valley, and mountain as well as flood, earthquake, whirlwind, and famine with attention devoted to methodological, epistemological, and ontological issues. The symbolic or interpreted role played by these same specific entities in the three religions is the second notion to be explored. The third focus is an inquiry into the geography of prophetic and apocalyptic visions and the role of geographical imagination in the development of religious self-understanding. This interface of natural and historical geography with the geography of the prophetic and apocalyptic imagination produces a graphic, sometimes terrifying landscape. The volume's nine essayists have approached their chapters with this threefold schematization in mind so that the book consists of one study devoted to each of these dimensions in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, as well as an introduction and afterword by the editors. Each essay discusses the relationship of the spatial and the sacred in scripture and in subsequent literary and theological reflection upon scriptural themes. The range of topics and variety of approaches used reflect the interpretive ambiguities that stem from the unique social, political, and economic functions conferred on places and spaces of particular significance in the life and thought of a religious tradition or community. The section on Judaism explores Jewish agricultural settlements in Palestine; the Temple Mount al-haram al-sharif; and the Garden of Eden. Indepth looks at Finland, women's geography, and the apocalyptic world comprise the section on Christianity. Iranian feasting and pilgrimage circuits, modern Egypt, and sacred geography are assessed in the final section on Islam. This carefully edited, innovative study offers a unique approach to the study of religion and will be read profitably by scholars and students of religion and geography.

How Catholic churches are being sapped of their spiritual vitality and what you can do about it The problem with new-style churches isn't just that they're ugly they actually distort the Faith and lead Catholics away from Catholicism. So argues Michel S. Rose in these eye-opening pages, which banish forever the notion that lovers of traditional-style churches are motivated simply by taste or nostalgia. In terms that non-architects can understand (and modern architects can't dismiss!), Rose shows that far more is at stake: modern churches actually violate the three natural laws of church architecture and lead Catholics to worship, quite simply, a false god.

The 1996 conference of the Centre for Faith & Culture in Oxford and the associated Oxford Declaration on Liturgy (included in this volume) gave a voice to calls for the 'reform of the reform.' This book forms a point of reference and a resource for those who are concerned about the need to recover a sense of the sacred in Catholic Liturgy.