by Jon Lackman | 16 November 2007 | Architecture
In the July 2007 issue of Material Religion, Jeanne Halgren Kilde writes
In recent years, the critical study of sacred space has stake a new and prominent claim on the landscape of religious studies … Critical approaches to the study of religious space vary widely: hermeneutical analyses informed by the neo-Eliadean perspective of Lindsay Jones; explorations of the meanings associated with place that build upon the work of human geographers such as Yi-Fu Tuan; examinations of the function of power informed by the work of Michel Foucault; discussions of the constitutive role of religious space in the construction of gender, racial, and ethnic identities and strategies within hegemonic contexts; examinations of the cultural embeddedness of religious space informed by the work of Henri Lefebvre and Edward W. Soja; and explorations of the function of space and place in the construction of the collective memories that lend coherence and endurance to social communities informed by the work of Maurice Halbwachs are merely a few examples …
To foster conversations among the diverse scholars who study religious space and place, a group of individuals successfully proposed a new program unit to the [American Academy of Religion], the Space, Place and Religious Meaning Consultation, which will offer its inaugural session at the 2007 Annual Meeting to be held in San Diego.
That meeting is this weekend, November 17-20.
