Landscapes of the Secular

Landscapes of the Secular PDF Author: Nicolas Howe
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022637680X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
“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.

Landscapes of the Secular

Landscapes of the Secular PDF Author: Nicolas Howe
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022637680X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
“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.

Landscapes of the Secular

Landscapes of the Secular PDF Author: Nicolas Howe
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022637677X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
"Chapter 3 has been revised and expanded from a previously published article by Nicolas Howe, "Thou Shalt Not Misinterpret: Landscape as Legal Performance," Annals of the Association of American Geographers, April 15, 2008."

The Secular Landscape

The Secular Landscape PDF Author: Kevin McCaffree
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 331950262X
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 287

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Book Description
This book proposes a comprehensive theory of the loss of religion in human societies, with a specific and substantive focus on the contemporary United States. Kevin McCaffree draws on a range of disciplines including sociology, psychology, anthropology, and history to explore topics such as the origin of religion, the role of religion in recent American history, the loss of religion, and how Americans are dealing with this loss. The book is not only richly theoretical but also empirical. Hundreds of scientific studies are cited, and new statistical analyses enhance its core arguments. What emerges is an integrative and illuminating theory of secularization.

Layered Landscapes

Layered Landscapes PDF Author: Eric Nelson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1317107209
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
This volume explores the conceptualization and construction of sacred space in a wide variety of faith traditions: Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, and the religions of Japan. It deploys the notion of "layered landscapes" in order to trace the accretions of praxis and belief, the tensions between old and new devotional patterns, and the imposition of new religious ideas and behaviors on pre-existing religious landscapes in a series of carefully chosen locales: Cuzco, Edo, Geneva, Granada, Herat, Istanbul, Jerusalem, Kanchipuram, Paris, Philadelphia, Prague, and Rome. Some chapters hone in on the process of imposing novel religious beliefs, while others focus on how vestiges of displaced faiths endured. The intersection of sacred landscapes with political power, the world of ritual, and the expression of broader cultural and social identity are also examined. Crucially, the volume reveals that the creation of sacred space frequently involved more than religious buildings and was a work of historical imagination and textual expression. While a book of contrasts as much as comparisons, the volume demonstrates that vital questions about the location of the sacred and its reification in the landscape were posed by religious believers across the early-modern world.

Urban Landscapes

Urban Landscapes PDF Author: P. J. Larkham
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113467886X
Category : Architecture
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Taking a multidisciplinary approach this addresses the academic and practical issues concerning the present and future of the built environment, arguing for its enlightened management in the future of our present-day environment.

Apocalyptic Geographies

Apocalyptic Geographies PDF Author: Jerome Tharaud
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691203261
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 358

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Book Description
How nineteenth-century Protestant evangelicals used print and visual media to shape American culture In nineteenth-century America, "apocalypse" referred not to the end of the world but to sacred revelation, and "geography" meant both the physical landscape and its representation in printed maps, atlases, and pictures. In Apocalyptic Geographies, Jerome Tharaud explores how white Protestant evangelicals used print and visual media to present the antebellum landscape as a “sacred space” of spiritual pilgrimage, and how devotional literature influenced secular society in important and surprising ways. Reading across genres and media—including religious tracts and landscape paintings, domestic fiction and missionary memoirs, slave narratives and moving panoramas—Apocalyptic Geographies illuminates intersections of popular culture, the physical spaces of an expanding and urbanizing nation, and the spiritual narratives that ordinary Americans used to orient their lives. Placing works of literature and visual art—from Thomas Cole’s The Oxbow to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Henry David Thoreau’s Walden—into new contexts, Tharaud traces the rise of evangelical media, the controversy and backlash it engendered, and the role it played in shaping American modernity.

Race and Secularism in America

Race and Secularism in America PDF Author: Jonathon S. Kahn
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231541279
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
This anthology draws bold comparisons between secularist strategies to contain, privatize, and discipline religion and the treatment of racialized subjects by the American state. Specializing in history, literature, anthropology, theology, religious studies, and political theory, contributors expose secularism's prohibitive practices in all facets of American society and suggest opportunities for change.

Sacred Sites, Sacred Places

Sacred Sites, Sacred Places PDF Author: David L. Carmichael
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135633207
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
Sacred Sites, Sacred Places explores the concept of 'sacred' and what it means and implies to people in differing cultures. It looks at why people regard some parts of the land as special and why this ascription remains constant in some cultures and changes in others. Archaeologists, legislators and those involved in heritage management sometimes encounter conflict with local populations over sacred sites. With the aid of over 70 illustrations the book examines the extreme importance of such sacred places in all cultures and the necessity of accommodating those intimate beliefs which are such a vital part of ongoing cultural identity. Sacred Sites, Sacred Places therefore will be of help to those who wish to be non-destructive in their conservation and excavation practices. This book is unique in attempting to describe the belief systems surrounding the existence of sacred sites, and at the same time bringing such beliefs and practices into relationship with the practical problems of everyday heritage management. The geographical coverage of the book is exceptionally wide and its variety of contributors, including indigenous peoples, archaeologists and heritage professionals, is unrivalled in any other publication.

Space, Place and Religious Landscapes

Space, Place and Religious Landscapes PDF Author: Darrelyn Gunzburg
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350079898
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
Exploring sacred mountains around the world, this book examines whether bonding and reverence to a mountain is intrinsic to the mountain, constructed by people, or a mutual encounter. Chapters explore mountains in England, Scotland, Wales, Italy, Ireland, the Himalaya, Japan, Greece, USA, Asia and South America, and embrace the union of sky, landscape and people to examine the religious dynamics between human and non-human entities. This book takes as its starting point the fact that mountains physically mediate between land and sky and act as metaphors for bridges from one realm to another, recognising that mountains are relational and that landscapes form personal and group cosmologies. The book fuses ideas of space, place and material religion with cultural environmentalism and takes an interconnected approach to material religio-landscapes. In this way it fills the gap between lived religious traditions, personal reflection, phenomenology, historical context, environmental philosophy, myths and performativity. In defining material religion as active engagement with mountain-forming and humanshaping landscapes, the research and ideas presented here provide theories that are widely applicable to other forms of material religion.

A Secular Age

A Secular Age PDF Author: Charles Taylor
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674986911
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 889

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Book Description
The place of religion in society has changed profoundly in the last few centuries, particularly in the West. In what will be a defining book for our time, Taylor takes up the question of what these changes mean, and what, precisely, happens when a society becomes one in which faith is only one human possibility among others.