Emerging Geographies of Belief

Emerging Geographies of Belief
Author: Catherine Brace
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 315
Release: 2010-10-12
Genre: Science
ISBN: 144382593X

This interdisciplinary book presents new research from international scholars that explores questions of belief, faith, and religion. Focusing on theoretically informed cultural, geographical and historical analyses of faith, belief, religion, society and space, the book presents new and revised theoretical approaches and methodologies, grounded in rigorous empirical research both contemporary and historical. The volume takes a deliberately eclectic approach, reflecting the complex interactions of the political and poetic dimensions of sacredness in contemporary societies. Taking this research agenda forward, this book explores how religious beliefs inform and construct social identities, public knowledge and modes of governance. In particular, the book meets an urgent need for a critical understanding of how terms such as “religion,” “faith,” “fundamentalism” and “secularism,” for example, inform public debates and foster constructive engagements both between faith groups and between people of faith and people of no faith. The essays in Emerging Geographies of Belief also show that religion cannot be mapped neatly onto faith or belief. We attempt to tease out the different circumstances in which—for example—belief can operate without religious adherence or faith can inspire social action in geographies of hope. The geography of the title relates to an overarching concern with space and spatiality rather than describing a single disciplinary approach. Our concern with belief, faith and religion operates at different temporal and spatial scales in different localities, from the contemporary appeal to a more global sense of responsibility to a historically situated account of faith-led educational practices. This reflects, more generally, the so-called spatial turn in the social sciences and humanities. But despite this wide historical and geographical sweep, the authors share some key concerns. This collection is unique in combining theoretical, conceptual and discursive approaches to the emerging geographies of belief with substantive examples of the intersection of belief, faith and religion with aspects of everyday life. Discussions of the potential subversive and prophetic capacities of faith, belief and religion sit alongside consideration of how these have become implicated in the spaces and performances of hope. It provides a critique of the situationist and substantive approaches to religion along with insights into the role of faith in education, community and social work. It considers the practices of remembrance, representation and pilgrimage and the place of religion in contemporary identity politics. In sum, the book problematises the seemingly simple categories of faith, religion, and belief, calling attention to how these are mobilised and implicated differently in different circumstances. In addressing these themes, the book provides a key theoretical resource, but crucially, goes on to show how multiple perspectives on belief, however defined, can be applied in practice. Whilst there has been much contemporary work on the individual areas covered by the book, they have not been bought together before to provide a dynamic insight into issues of the most pressing relevance.

Religion and Place

Religion and Place
Author: Peter Hopkins
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2012-09-13
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9400746849

This unique collection highlights the importance of landscape, politics and piety to our understandings of religion and place. The geographies of religion have developed rapidly in the last couple of decades and this book provides both a conceptual framing of the key issues and debates involved, and rich illustrations through empirical case studies. The chapters span the discipline of human geography and cover contexts as diverse as veiling in Turkey, religious landscapes in rural Peru, and refugees and faith in South Africa. A number of prominent scholars and emerging researchers examine topical themes in each engaging chapter with significant foci being: religious transnationalism and religious landscapes; gendering of religious identities and contexts; fashion, faith and the body; identity, resistance and belief; immigrant identities, citizenship and spaces of belief; alternative spiritualities and places of retreat and enchantment. Together they make a series of important contributions that illuminate the central role of geography to the meaning and implications of lived religion, public piety and religious embodiment. As such, this collection will be of much interest to researchers and students working on topics relating to religion and place, including human geographers, sociologists, religious studies and religious education scholars.

Religion, Sustainability, and Place

Religion, Sustainability, and Place
Author: Steven E. Silvern
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2020-12-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9811576467

This book explores how religious groups work to create sustainable relationships between people, places and environments. This interdisciplinary volume deepens our understanding of this relationship, revealing that the geographical imagination—our sense of place—is a key aspect of the sustainability ideas and practices of religious groups. The book begins with a broad examination of how place shapes faith-based ideas about sustainability, with examples drawn from indigenous Hawaiians and the sacred texts of Judaism and Islam. Empirical case studies from North America, Europe, Central Asia and Africa follow, illustrating how a local, bounded, and sacred sense of place informs religious-based efforts to protect people and natural resources from threatening economic and political forces. Other contributors demonstrate that a cosmopolitan geographical imagination, viewing place as extending from the local to the global, shapes the struggles of Christian, Jewish and interfaith groups to promote just and sustainable food systems and battle the climate crisis.

The Geography of Religion

The Geography of Religion
Author: Roger W. Stump
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2008-04-04
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0742581497

The only book of its kind, this balanced and accessibly written text explores the geographical study of religion. Roger W. Stump presents a clear and meticulous examination of the intersection of religious belief and practice with the concepts of place and space. He begins by analyzing the factors that have shaped the spatial distributions of religious groups, including the seminal events that have fostered the organization of religions in diverse hearths and the subsequent processes of migration and conversion that have spread religious beliefs. The author then assesses how major religions have diversified as they have become established in disparate places, producing a variety of religious systems from a common tradition. Stump explores the efforts of religious groups to control secular space at various scales, relating their own uses of particular spaces and the meanings they attribute to space beyond the boundaries of their own communities. Examining sacred space as a diverse but recurring theme in religious belief, the book considers its role in religious forms of spatial behavior and as a source of conflict within and between religious groups. Refreshingly jargon-free and impartial, this text provides a broad, comparative view of religion as a focus of geographical inquiry.

Geographies of Postsecularity

Geographies of Postsecularity
Author: Paul Cloke
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2019-01-03
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1317367634

This book explores the hopeful possibility that emerging geographies of postsecularity are able to contribute significantly to the understanding of how common life may be shared, and how caring for the common goods of social justice, well-being, equality, solidarity and respect for difference may be imagined and practiced. Drawing on recent geographic theory to recalibrate ideas of the postsecular public sphere, the authors develop the case for postsecularity as a condition of being that is characterised by practices of receptive generosity, rapprochement between religious and secular ethics, and a hopeful re-enchantment and re-shaping of desire towards common life. The authors highlight the contested formation of ethical subjectivity under neoliberalism and the emergence of postsecularity within this process as an ethically-attuned politics which changes relations between religion and secularity and animates novel, hopeful imaginations, subjectivities, and praxes as alternatives to neoliberal norms. The spaces and subjectivities of emergent postsecularity are examined through a series of innovative case studies, including food banks, drug and alcohol treatment, refugee humanitarian activism in Calais, homeless participatory art projects, community responses to the Christchurch earthquakes in New Zealand, amongst others. The book also traces the global conditions for postsecularity beyond the Western and predominantly Christian-secular nexus of engagement. This is a valuable resource for students in several academic disciplines, including geography, sociology, politics, religious studies, international development and anthropology. It will be of great interest to secular and faith-based practitioners working in religion, spirituality, politics or more widely in public policy, urban planning and community development.

Sacred Worlds

Sacred Worlds
Author: Chris Park
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 350
Release: 2002-11-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 113487734X

This book, the first in the field for two decades, looks at the relationships between geography and religion. It represents a synthesis of research by geographers of many countries, mainly since the 1960s. No previous book has tackled this emerging field from such a broad, interdisciplinary perspective, and never before have such a variety of detailed case studies been pulled together in so comparative or illuminating a way. Examples and case studies have been drawn from all the major world religions and from all continents from both a historical and contemporary perspective. Major themes covered in the book include the distribution of religion and the processes by which religion and religious ideas spread through space and time. Some of the important links between religion and population are also explored. A great deal of attention is focused on the visible manifestations of religion on the cultural landscape, including landscapes of worship and of death, and the whole field of sacred space and religious pilgrimage.

The Changing World Religion Map

The Changing World Religion Map
Author: Stanley D. Brunn
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 3858
Release: 2015-02-03
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 940179376X

This extensive work explores the changing world of religions, faiths and practices. It discusses a broad range of issues and phenomena that are related to religion, including nature, ethics, secularization, gender and identity. Broadening the context, it studies the interrelation between religion and other fields, including education, business, economics and law. The book presents a vast array of examples to illustrate the changes that have taken place and have led to a new world map of religions. Beginning with an introduction of the concept of the “changing world religion map”, the book first focuses on nature, ethics and the environment. It examines humankind’s eternal search for the sacred, and discusses the emergence of “green” religion as a theme that cuts across many faiths. Next, the book turns to the theme of the pilgrimage, illustrated by many examples from all parts of the world. In its discussion of the interrelation between religion and education, it looks at the role of missionary movements. It explains the relationship between religion, business, economics and law by means of a discussion of legal and moral frameworks, and the financial and business issues of religious organizations. The next part of the book explores the many “new faces” that are part of the religious landscape and culture of the Global North (Europe, Russia, Australia and New Zealand, the U.S. and Canada) and the Global South (Latin America, Africa and Asia). It does so by looking at specific population movements, diasporas, and the impact of globalization. The volume next turns to secularization as both a phenomenon occurring in the Global religious North, and as an emerging and distinguishing feature in the metropolitan, cosmopolitan and gateway cities and regions in the Global South. The final part of the book explores the changing world of religion in regards to gender and identity issues, the political/religious nexus, and the new worlds associated with the virtual technologies and visual media.

The Psychology of Religion and Place

The Psychology of Religion and Place
Author: Victor Counted
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 340
Release: 2019-11-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 303028848X

This book examines the role of religious and spiritual experiences in people’s understanding of their environment. The contributors consider how understandings and experiences of religious and place connections are motivated by the need to seek and maintain contact with perceptual objects, so as to form meaningful relationship experiences. The volume is one of the first scholarly attempts to discuss the psychological links between place and religious experiences.The chapters within provide insights for understanding how people’s experiences with geographical places and the sacred serve as agencies for meaning-making, pro-social behaviour, and psychological adjustment in everyday life.

Geographies of Anticolonialism

Geographies of Anticolonialism
Author: Andrew Davies
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 184
Release: 2019-12-16
Genre: Science
ISBN: 111938155X

A fresh approach to scholarship on the diverse nature of Indian anticolonial processes. Brings together a varied selection of literature to explore Indian anticolonialism in new ways Offers a different perspective to geographers seeking to understand political resistance to colonialism Addresses contemporary studies that argue nationalism was joined by other political processes, such as revolutionary and anarchist ideologies, to shape the Indian independence movement Includes a focus on a specific anticolonial group, the “Pondicherry Gang,” and investigates their significant impact which went beyond South India Helps readers understand the diverse nature of anticolonialism, which in turn prompts thinking about the various geographies produced through anticolonial activity

Social Geographies

Social Geographies
Author: The Newcastle Social Geographies Collective
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 441
Release: 2020-10-19
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1786612313

Marking the renaissance of social geographies in recent years, this major textbook showcases the breadth of conceptual and empirical approaches that scholars now utilize to understand contemporary social issues through a spatial lens. The book is collectively authored by one of the largest groups of social geographers in the world. It develops a vision of social geographies that is rooted in the commitments that have characterised the sub-discipline for at least half a decade (e.g. society-space relations, justice, equality), while incorporating new approaches, theories and concerns (e.g. emotions, performance, and the more-than-human). Embracing the increasing porosity of our work with neighbouring economic, cultural, political and environmental geographies, the book provides a round-up of the state of the sub-discipline, capturing recent directions and charting new questions and challenges for theory, research and practice. It makes sense of the bewildering variety of contemporary social geographical interests, from longstanding topics (e.g. race, class and gender) to more recent interests (e.g. sustainability, digital worlds and social change). Above all, it makes clear the relevance and contributions of social geographies not only to understanding a wide range of global and local issues, but to social change alongside communities, policy-makers and social movements. Each chapter offers an introduction to current work in social geographies, providing an overview and in-depth examples. The book has these key features that make it an essential resource for any social geography course: An accessible and engaging style that is ideal for entry level students Definitions of key terms and carefully explained concepts and ideas A range of exciting contemporary examples from a wide variety of geographical settings, including those drawn from the authors’ recent research Cross-referencing between chapters to help students expand learning Illustration with photos, tables, diagrams and other material Suggestions for further reading in each chapter “Real world research” and “real world theory” textboxes providing examples of research projects and theoretical perspectives, bringing topics alive and exploring challenges on the ground