No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Religion
Abstract
Geographies of religion have expanded in size and scope over the past three decades. They have evolved from consideration of the areal distribution of religions around the world to more sustained engagements with how religious phenomena are imprinted on the landscape. Associated with this shift has been a focus on how space is (re)produced by different religious actors (and the workings of power therein), the experiences of religion in and through space, and how religious spaces intersect with the formation of communities and identities. More recently, geographies of religion have engaged with topical debates surrounding the secularization and purported postsecularization of Western societies, and with the emergence of new forms of spirituality in the contemporary world. Combined, these developments underscore the fact that geographies of religion do not exist in isolation, but in conversation with the academic and social worlds within which they are embedded.
ResearchGate has not been able to resolve any citations for this publication.
In this paper I examine the processes and politics associated with the formation of evangelical house churches in Sri Lanka. In doing so, I show how the sacred space of the house church is constructed through the development of sacred networks, which emerge when a group of Christians assemble for prayer and worship. Sacred networks grant the house church an important degree of mobility, but they also encourage church fission. Whilst the house church enables evangelical groups to grow in hostile environments like that of Sri Lanka, it is often a superficial form of growth that is unsustainable in the long term. To conclude, I suggest that an understanding of sacred networks can help inject a sense of scalar dynamism into the study of contemporary religious movements.
This paper explores the emergence of urban spaces of partnership between people of faith and those of no religious faith who come together to offer care, welfare and justice to socially excluded people. The activities of such groups are understood in terms of adjustments to the secularization thesis pointing to the possibilities of a series of emerging geographies relating to postsecular rapprochement and different forms of reterritorialization in the city. In particular, the accounts of postsecularism by Klaus Eder and Jürgen Habermas are used to explain both how the hushed-up voice of religion is being released back into the public sphere in some settings, and how the assimilation and mutually reflexive transformation of secular and theological ideas may represent crossover narratives around which postsecular partnerships can converge around particular ethical precepts and practical needs. Taking the particular example of Christian religion in western Europe, the paper traces both how a critique of secularism has led to some instances of contemporary political expression underpinned by theological precepts that are converted into practical ethics, and how a greater propensity among the Christian faith to explore faith-by-praxis has fuelled increased activity in the public sphere. Not all such activity can be regarded as postsecular, but emergent spaces of postsecular partnership in the city offer possibilities for new, perhaps liminal, geographies of resistance that cannot be explained away as simply the incorporation of religious capital into neoliberal governance. The possibilities of mutually transformative possibilities in these partnerships open both politics and faith up to processes of poststructural reterritorializing as part of the faith-in-practice of postsecularism.
As Foucault's work demonstrates, a culture cannot understand itself without first understanding its implicit connection and development within the constructs of religious belief and practice. Contemporary culture is born out of religious traditions and the conditions of our knowledge are therefore embedded in religious discourse. The so-called secular space is itself a hybrid of past religious traditions, and in order to understand contemporary culture Foucault recognised (and was fascinated by) the religious influences upon thought and practice.
This paper sets out to define what is meant by a spiritual landscape. As such it theorizes the immaterial push of spirit alongside the materiality of landscape by rendering spiritual landscapes as the associate mapping of the relations between bodily existence, felt practice and faith in something immanent but not manifest as such. To achieve this, the paper uses recent debates relating post-phenomenology to one aspect of spirituality-that associated with Christian religion, teasing out how landscape (existence), practice (performance) and affect (immanence) offer up alternative ways to think our being in the world. This is to suggest important new theoretical understandings of how faith and belief, Christianity and phenomenology, recast our notion of being in the world. Thus we seek wider understandings of the importance and centrality of the spiritual landscapes that forge a sense of community, arguing that such a community is already a part of our individual and singular communal disposition.
Debates on the postsecular have been paralleled by a growing body of work on sacred space. Most of this work has generally focused on its ‘making’ and on the ‘unofficially sacred’. Transformations of extant official sites of worship have largely remained out of such debates despite increasing public attention and a burgeoning literature in the humanities. In bringing these processes into geographers’ agendas, this article suggests a shift in focus from postsecular narratives to ‘infrasecular’ geographies, that is, to a spatial paradigm able to capture the complexity and materialities of multi-layered coexistences. Infrasecular geographies are characterized by the contemporaneous co-habitation and competition between multiple forms of belief and non-belief, as well as by hidden layers of collective religious subconsciousness which underpin contemporary Western European societies. Taken collectively, processes of desacralization, desecration and resacralization constitute and express infrasecular geographies. They are tangible manifestations of social and cultural transformations and of transformed attitudes towards sacred space and the sacred itself.
The paper evaluates the burst in geographical research on religion in the last decade. It examines: (1) the relative emphases and silences in analyses of different sites of religious practice, sensuous geographies, population constituents, religions, geographies and scales of analyses; (2) the rise in the discourse of postsecularization; and (3) four contemporary global shifts (growing urbanization and social inequality, deteriorating environments, ageing populations, and increasing human mobilities), the ways in which religion shapes human response to them, and the implications for new research agendas.
The burgeoning subfield of the geography of religion has largely advanced under the assumption that secularization is marginal to understanding contemporary religion. This assumption, evinced in terms such as ‘postsecular’, suggests that the theory of secularization has little to offer geography. This paper elaborates on the current debates over secularization theory’s validity within geography and across other disciplines in an effort to salvage several key geographical insights from the most advanced work in secularization theory. It is argued here that secularization theory, far from being irrelevant, offers geographers of religion a powerful theoretical framework for analyzing and interpreting modern religion.
This article reviews geographical research on religion in the 1990s, and highlights work from neighbouring disciplines where relevant. Contrary to views that the field is incoherent, I suggest that much of the literature pays attention to several key themes, particu- larly, the politics and poetics of religious place, identity and community. I illustrate the key issues, arguments and conceptualizations in these areas, and suggest various ways forward. These 'new' geographies emphasize different sites of religious practice beyond the 'officially sacred'; different sensuous sacred geographies; different religions in different historical and place-specific contexts; different geographical scales of analysis; different constitutions of population and their experience of and effect on religious place, identity and community; different dialectics (sociospatial, public-private, politics-poetics); and different moralities.
The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis. Equinox
- P Hopkins
- L Kong
- Piety
- Dordrecht Springer
- K Knott
Hopkins, P., Kong, L., Olson, E. (Eds.), 2013. Religion and Place: Landscape, Politics and Piety. Springer, Dordrecht.
Knott, K., 2005. The Location of Religion: A Spatial Analysis. Equinox, London and Oakville, CT.
Religion and Space: Competition, Conflict and Violence in the Contemporary World
- L Kong
- O Woods
- Bloomsbury
- London
- J Tse
Kong, L., Woods, O., 2016. Religion and Space: Competition, Conflict and Violence in the Contemporary World. Bloomsbury, London.
Tse, J., 2013. Religion and the secular in human geography. Prog. Hum. Geogr. 38 (2), 201-220.