Landscape as Sacred Space

Steven LewisReligion
Landscape as Sacred Space

Author: Steven Lewis

Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers

ISBN: 9781597522113

Category: Religion

Page: 120

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Steven Lewis's Landscape as Sacred Space: Metaphors for the Spiritual Journey invites new discussions about our spiritual journeys and allows seekers to rethink approaches to Christian spirituality and theology in light of postmodernity. Landscape metaphors provide a common and accessible language to articulate one's spiritual journey. Spiritual mountains, deserts, and valleys are dominant landscapes on our journey through life. Most people have experienced the joy of a mountaintop spiritual experience, the pain of spiritual deserts, or perhaps the dreariness too often associated with spiritual valleys. There is a tendency, however, to highlight spiritual mountaintops, while avoiding spiritual deserts and ignoring spiritual valleys. This leaves many Christians ill-equipped either to deal with crises or to integrate God into ordinary life. Each landscape offers rich lessons that, when combined together, lead us toward a maturing faith and into a deeper relationship with God. 'Landscape as Sacred Space' is intended to aid those who search for more meaningful ways to articulate their faith journey. The book grants permission to struggle with life's landscapes, provides safe spaces to reflect on the journey, and introduces language that enables exploration and discovery.

The Place of Landscape

Jeff MalpasLandscapes
The Place of Landscape

Author: Jeff Malpas

Publisher: MIT Press

ISBN: 9780262015523

Category: Landscapes

Page: 384

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Interdisciplinary perspectives on landscape, from the philosophical to the geographical, with an emphasis on the overarching concept of place. This volume explores the conceptual "topography" of landscape: It examines the character of landscape as itself a mode of place as well as the modes of place that appear in relation to landscape. Leading scholars from a range of disciplines explore the concept of landscape, including its supposed relation to the spectatorial, its character as time-space, its relation to indigenous notions of "country," and its liminality. They examine landscape as it appears within a variety of contexts, from geography through photography and garden history to theology; and more specific studies look at the forms of landscape in medieval landscape painting, film and television, and in relation to national identity. The essays demonstrate that the study of landscape cannot be restricted to any one genre, cannot be taken as the exclusive province of any one discipline, and cannot be exhausted by any single form of analysis. What the place of landscape now evokes is itself a wide-ranging terrain encompassing issues concerning the nature of place, of human being in place, and of the structures that shape such being and are shaped by it.

Human Development in Sacred Landscapes

Lutz KäppelReligion
Human Development in Sacred Landscapes

Author: Lutz Käppel

Publisher: V&R unipress GmbH

ISBN: 9783847102526

Category: Religion

Page: 254

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"Holy Landscape" is a term frequently used to describe a multidimensional phenomenon. What this actually comprises is hard to define. Precisely this question is addressed in this volume. The "holy landscape" depends on people's Weltanschauung and is influenced by their respective culture and ethos. It is not just a question of religious buildings and rituals, nor is a mere matter of explicating terms such as "pure" and "impure", magic and myths; it is about an expressive space in which the "ceremony and mood of rites and cults" take place. The contributions also deal with the emergence and continuing development of the term "holy landscape" and the changing expressions of religious mood.

Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity

Ralph HausslerSocial Science
Sacred Landscapes in Antiquity

Author: Ralph Haussler

Publisher: Oxbow Books

ISBN: 9781789253344

Category: Social Science

Page: 360

View: 967

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From generation to generation, people experience their landscapes differently. Humans depend on their natural environment: it shapes their behavior while it is often felt that deities responsible for both natural benefits and natural calamities (such as droughts, famines, floods and landslides) need to be appeased. We presume that, in many societies, lakes, rivers, rocks, mountains, caves and groves were considered sacred. Individual sites and entire landscapes are often associated with divine actions, mythical heroes and etiological myths. Throughout human history, people have also felt the need to monumentalize their sacred landscape. But this is where the similarities end as different societies had very different understandings, believes and practices. The aim of this new thematic appraisal is to scrutinize carefully our evidence and rethink our methodologies in a multi-disciplinary approach. More than 30 papers investigate diverse sacred landscapes from the Iberian peninsula and Britain in the west to China in the east. They discuss how to interpret the intricate web of ciphers and symbols in the landscape and how people might have experienced it. We see the role of performance, ritual, orality, textuality and memory in people’s sacred landscapes. A diachronic view allows us to study how landscapes were ‘rewritten’, adapted and redefined in the course of time to suit new cultural, political and religious understandings, not to mention the impact of urbanism on people’s understandings. A key question is how was the landscape manipulated, transformed and monumentalized – especially the colossal investments in monumental architecture we see in certain socio-historic contexts or the creation of an alternative humanmade, seemingly ‘non-natural’ landscape, with perfectly astronomically aligned buildings that define a cosmological order? Sacred Landscapes therefore aims to analyze the complex links between landscape, ‘religiosity’ and society, developing a dialectic framework that explores sacred landscapes across the ancient world in a dynamic, holistic, contextual and historical perspective.

Healing in the Landscape of Prayer

Avery BrookeReligion
Healing in the Landscape of Prayer

Author: Avery Brooke

Publisher: Church Publishing, Inc.

ISBN: 9780819225993

Category: Religion

Page: 160

View: 109

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For Christians, the ministry of healing prayer goes back to our deepest roots, to Jesus of Nazareth, who cared for those suffering in body and in spirit. As his followers, we are challenged—and empowered—to do the same. Members of mainline Christian denominations, however, may be skeptical about this ministry, as author Avery Brooke was at first. She tells the surprising story of healing prayer in her own life and that of her church in Connecticut. With clarity and thoroughness, she traces the history of healing prayer, examining it as part of the larger “landscape of prayer.” This book provides a foundation—and a wealth of practical information—for clergy and lay people to explore healing prayer in their own lives and parishes.

The Solace of Fierce Landscapes

Belden C. LaneReligion
The Solace of Fierce Landscapes

Author: Belden C. Lane

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 019976042X

Category: Religion

Page: 296

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In the tradition of Kathleen Norris, Terry Tempest Williams, and Thomas Merton, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes explores the impulse that has drawn seekers into the wilderness for centuries and offers eloquent testimony to the healing power of mountain silence and desert indifference. Interweaving a memoir of his mother's long struggle with Alzheimer's and cancer, meditations on his own wilderness experience, and illuminating commentary on the Christian via negativa--a mystical tradition that seeks God in the silence beyond language--Lane rejects the easy affirmations of pop spirituality for the harsher but more profound truths that wilderness can teach us. "There is an unaccountable solace that fierce landscapes offer to the soul. They heal, as well as mirror, the brokeness we find within." It is this apparent paradox that lies at the heart of this remarkable book: that inhuman landscapes should be the source of spiritual comfort. Lane shows that the very indifference of the wilderness can release us from the demands of the endlessly anxious ego, teach us to ignore the inessential in our own lives, and enable us to transcend the "false self" that is ever-obsessed with managing impressions. Drawing upon the wisdom of St. John of the Cross, Meister Eckhardt, Simone Weil, Edward Abbey, and many other Christian and non-Christian writers, Lane also demonstrates how those of us cut off from the wilderness might "make some desert" in our lives. Written with vivid intelligence, narrative ease, and a gracefulness that is itself a comfort, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes gives us not only a description but a "performance" of an ancient and increasingly relevant spiritual tradition.

Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800

R. MayhewPhilosophy
Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800

Author: R. Mayhew

Publisher: Springer

ISBN: 9780230504196

Category: Philosophy

Page: 426

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Landscape, Literature and English Religious Culture, 1660-1800 offers a powerful revisionist account of the intellectual significance of landscape descriptions during the 'long' Eighteenth-century. Landscape has long been a major arena for debate about the nature of Eighteenth-century English culture; this book surveys those debates and offers a provocative new account. Mayhew shows that describing landscape was a religiously contested practice, and that different theological positions led differing authors to different descriptive approaches. Landscape description, then, shows English intellectual life still in the grips of a Christian and classical mentality in the 'long' Eighteenth-century.

Poetry, Space, Landscape

Chris FitterLiterary Criticism
Poetry, Space, Landscape

Author: Chris Fitter

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

ISBN: 0521463017

Category: Literary Criticism

Page: 358

View: 987

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In this survey of nature-sensibility from the ancient world to the Renaissance Chris Fitter suggests a new social and historical theory of the conceptualisation of space, and argues that readings of natural reality are determined by our social and material relations with nature.

Landscape Imagery, Politics, and Identity in a Divided Germany, 1968–1989

Professor Catherine WilkinsArt
Landscape Imagery, Politics, and Identity in a Divided Germany, 1968–1989

Author: Professor Catherine Wilkins

Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.

ISBN: 140944998X

Category: Art

Page: 284

View: 497

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Landscape Imagery, Politics and Identity in a Divided Germany, 1968-1989 explores the communicative relationship between German landscape painting and the viewing public that developed in the wake of the student revolutions of the late 1960s. The book dem

Christian Pilgrimage, Landscape and Heritage

Avril MaddrellReligion
Christian Pilgrimage, Landscape and Heritage

Author: Avril Maddrell

Publisher: Routledge

ISBN: 9781135013127

Category: Religion

Page: 226

View: 532

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This volume provides a theoretically and empirically-grounded study of the significance of landscape in the experience of Christian pilgrimage across different denominations and its intersection with cultural heritage and tourism. The book focuses on pilgrimages to Meteora (Greece), Subiaco (Italy) and the Isle of Man. These are each sites of scenic beauty that boast a rich heritage associated respectively to Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Ecumenical/ Protestant denominations. The study discusses different Christian theologies, practices and perspectives on the nature and the purpose of pilgrimage in these traditions. It draws on participant experiential accounts, archival research, and interviews with clergy, laity and local stakeholders. Special attention is paid to the themes of sacred space and practice, aesthetics, mobilities, embodiment and performance, emotional geographies, theology, cultural heritage, consumption and commodification, and the pilgrim-tourist continuum.

Landscapes

Hilary P. M. WinchesterCultural geography
Landscapes

Author: Hilary P. M. Winchester

Publisher: Pearson Education

ISBN: 0582288789

Category: Cultural geography

Page: 222

View: 344

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Landscapes is a timely and well-written analysis of the meaning of cultural landscapes. The book delves into the layers of meaning that are invested in ordinary landscapes as well as landscapes of spectacle and power. Landscapes is a powerful and vivid application of the new cultural geography to case studies not previously visited within cultural geography texts.