Joshuasummoned all Israel, their elders and heads, their judges and officers, and said tothem, “I am now old and well advanced in years, and you have seen all that the Lyour God has done to all these nations for your sake, for it is the L your God whohas fought for you.

They came out, with all their troops, a great army, innumber like the sand on the seashore, with very many horses and chariots.

The Lsaid to Joshua, “Do not fear them, for I have handed them over to you; not one ofthem shall stand before you.

Now if you are unwilling to serve the L, choose this day whom you willserve, whether the gods your ancestors served in the region beyond the River or thegods of the Amorites in whose land you are living, but as for me and my household,we will serve the L.

Then put away the foreign gods that are among you, and incline your hearts to theL, the God of Israel.”

o Joshua burned Ai and made itforever a heap of ruins, as it is to this day. And he hanged the king of Ai on a treeuntil evening, and at sunset Joshua commanded, and they took his body down fromthe tree, threw it down at the entrance of the gate of the city, and raised over it agreat heap of stones, which stands there to this day

But the king of Ai was taken alive and brought toJoshua.

hey are fleeing from us asbefore.’ While we flee from them, you shall rise up from the ambush and seize thecity, for the L your God will give it into your hand. And when you have taken thecity, you shall set the city on fire, doing as the L has ordered;

Whoever rebelsagainst your orders and disobeys your words, whatever you command, shall be put todeath. Only be strong and courageous.

Manasseh did not drive out the inhabitants of Beth-shean and its villages, orTaanach and its villages, or the inhabitants of Dor and its villages

with his brother Simeon, and they defeated the Canaanites who inhabited Zephathand devoted it to destruction.

At each location I conductedinterviews both with members of the religious community and with an official representative.The interviews were semistructured, consisting primarily of open-ended questions, and werearranged around three key areas: background and history; current involvement in the spiritualcommunity; and emotional experiences at the case-study locatio

While there are undoubtedly otherpossible explanations for the continued importance of religion in the United States, it is clearfrom this study that the reason why many participants returned to their church week after weekis the sense of togetherness they experienced. In such a mobile suburban society, it is a feelingof community that is not often experienced in our daily lives. Furthermore, it reinforces thenotion that ‘home’, and our feeling of being ‘at home’ extends beyond our legal address andare much more dynamic notions than they might seem.

Many participants relied on metaphors to explain their complex experience of being in a sacredspace. For a large number of members, being at their chosen house of worship gave them asense of being ‘home’, and this sentiment was acknowledged by members of both religiousgroups, particularly among long-standing members, like GC:

As mentioned, there has consistently been a lack of pragmatic engagement with the personalexperience of sacred space: studies have often relied on autobiographical narratives or researcherinterpretations, rather than first-hand accounts of participants.

While this study focused on members ofreligious communities, conducting interviews with architects, interior designers, and religiousleaders would shed much needed light on ways in which affective responses are engendered,and the degree to which the intended response is elicited.

Traditionally, sacred spaces are seen as breaks from the standard, ordinary spatial planes inwhich we operate on a daily basis (Eliade, 1957): we are in the world of our everyday existencewhile, at the same time, are somewhere wholly ‘different’ (see Seigworth and Gardiner, 2004).

One member of the church was particularly affectedby the feelings elicited by the pastel blue walls:“ It was calm. The paint on the wall, I painted my bedroom the same color” (interview, IW,United Methodist Church).

politics of war but, as evidenced by the case studies presented here, feelings of peace do notjust occur within space: they are often shaped by them, particularly within spiritual settings.

Saint Paul’s United Methodist Church (see figure 1) is one of the largest United MethodistChurches in Tallahassee, with an average worship attendance of 475 (United Methodist Church,2010). It occupies a prominent location along the banks of a popular public lake. Saint Paul’sUnited Methodist Church was founded in 1952 and currently has over 2000 members. Thesecond site, the Tallahassee Taoist Tai Chi Society (see figure 2), represents a diverse collectionof members from a wide array of religious backgrounds: some would consider themselves tobe religiously Taoist, while others attend classes solely for health benefits

Byexploring the affective capacity of a sacred space, geographers can more fully understand notonly the emotional experiences of being in these places, but also the sacred materialities uponwhich these experiences are patterned.

Although research on the geography of religion has experienced tremendous growth sinceKong’s 1990 survey, explorations into the personal experience of the sacred have remainedvirtually unexplored, with the exception of Holloway’s work (Kong, 2010).

If we accept that religious places inspire emotional experience in participants, then thegeography of religion seems to be an excellent field in which to cultivate studies of religion andemotion related to the spaces of worship

Without the ‘poetics’ of religious experience, the religious landscape would lose itstransformative quality. Furthermore, through the construction of both officially and unofficiallysacred sites, religious identity and feeling is reproduced and maintained.

However, an interest in the religious and spiritual landscape has remained at the forefront.Sacred sites, including houses of worship as well as other, ‘unofficial’ religious locations,represent perhaps the clearest indication of a religious presence on the landscape.

Sacred spaces often have a transcendent quality (Eliade, 1957) which can elicit powerfulemotional responses (Otto, 1958). They are geographical locations that instill and perpetuate avariety of feelings that affect human experiences and activities.

Landscape mightbe seen in this light as a sort of communicational resource, a system ofsigns and symbols, capable of extending the temporal and spatialrange of communication. In effect the physical durability of landscapepermits it to carry meaning into the future so as to help sustain mem-ory and cultural traditions. 18 Societies and cultures have many otherways to sustain collective values and beliefs, including ritual and oraltradition, but landscape stands apart from these—like writing—as adurable, visual representation

These includesome explosions, fires, and transportation accidents, as well as unusualevents such as the Salem witchcraft executions.

Thishas occurred after mass murders in a wide variety of locations stretch-ing back into the nineteenth century—for although the frequency ofmass murder is growing in recent decades, it has long been part of theAmerican scene.

Mass murder is the most common event to result in obliteration

Obliteration entails actively effacing all evidence of a tragedy to coverit up or remove it from view. Obliteration goes beyond rectification,for the site is not just cleansed but scoured. The site is not returned touse but more commonly removed from use. If the site is ever occupiedagain—usually after a long period of time—it will be put to a whollydifferent use.

Rectification is also the rule in cases of “senseless” violence. These areevents such as spontaneous riots at sports events or stray acts of terrorthat neither attain significance as ethical or heroic struggles nor in-duce a strong sense of community loss. These are acts of violence thatcome to be interpreted as “accidents.”

Thus, when an airplane or train crashes, thepublic focuses on the cause with an eye toward preventing similar ac-cidents and loses interest in the site itself.

Rectification is the process through which a tragedy site is put rightand used again. The site gains only temporary notoriety in the after-math of the tragedy. Associations with the fatal event eventuallyweaken, and the site is reintegrated into the activities of everyday life.No sense of honor or dishonor remains attached to the site; it is, so tospeak, exonerated of involvement in the tragedy

These areunique occurrences, “freak” accidents and tragedies that would leadto rectification or even obliteration if they were not so unusual

The pres-ent political climate allows these long dormant sites at last to be com-memorated. Similar sites can be found relating to Native Americansand a wide range of other ethnic and racial minorities, including Chi-nese Americans and Japanese Americans.

Efforts to do more began almost immediately thereafter,attempts to create some sort of public monument to King as a martyrto the cause of civil rights. Beginning at the grass-roots level, these ef-forts paid off two decades later in the creation of a civil rights museumand educational center at the site of the Lorraine Motel funded by lo-cal, state, and national authorities.

Some sanctified sites begin as designated places, often marking minor-ity causes

Most disasters strike heterogeneous populations whose allegiancesare divided among many separate groups. Losses may be great, butthe victims are not identified with one group and, as a consequence,are mourned individually and memorialized at the grave site. In caseswhere accidents draw victims from a group or community with asense of identity, however, a large public memorial is usually conse-crated, either at the disaster site itself or at a site of civic prominence

The creation of memorials both honorsthe victims of the disaster and helps the community to mourn. Rela-tively few tragedies result in sanctification, however.

Almost fifty years were required forthe Lincoln monument to be planned and built. During this periodLincoln’s standing as one of the most vilified presidents in historychanged radically. 8 Lincoln, whose election spurred Southern seces-sion, was termed one of America’s “immortals” when his memorialwas dedicated in 1922

The policemen’s monument attractedvandalism for decades and eventually had to be moved indoors to thepolice academy after being destroyed twice. All that remains at the siteis the defaced pedestal of the police monument

After riots or massacres, the minority group will assert that thetragedy illustrates principles worth remembering, only to find itselfopposed by a more powerful or larger group wishing to ignore theevent. The conflict over meaning—and sanctification—becomes apolitical struggle among social, religious, and ethnic factions

Few sites are consecrated with such eloquence, but all are inter-preted in the same fashion, in words that capture the essence of thesacrifice and explain why the event is worthy of remembrance.

I use the term sacred torefer to sites that are publicly consecrated or widely venerated ratherthan those owned or maintained by a particular religious group.

Sanctification involves the creation of what geographers term a “sa-cred” place—a site set apart from its surroundings and dedicated tothe memory of an event, person, or group.

I think that the comparison of such a wide variety ofsites can make comparisons difficult, but taken together, all suchplaces offer insights into how society deals with violence and adversity,how people create, sustain, and break emotional attachments to placeand landscape, and how Americans view and interpret the past.

From nationhood onward the United States experienced waveon wave of war, civil strife, natural calamity, accident, assassination,and crime.

The first“lost” colony on Roanoke Island was an indication of things to come,and over time Americans became intimately acquainted with tragedyand violence. Conflict between the Europeans and Native Americansbegan early, as did frictions among the European groups competingfor territory and influence in the New World.

In selecting examples for study, I began first to consider some ofthe great tragedies of the past. Every society in every period has bornewitness to war, disaster, violence, and tragedy

WhatI mean is that the evidence of violence left behind often pressures peo-ple, almost involuntarily, to begin debate over meaning. The sites,stained by the blood of violence and covered by the ashes of tragedy,force people to face squarely the meaning of an event. The barbedwire and brick crematoria of the concentration camps cannot be ig-nored; they demand interpretation.

The question has always been whether to ignore theepisode as a brief, shameful anomaly, to recognize it as a valid part ofSalem’s history, or to honor it as a turning point in American religion.

In Germanyand other nations that lived under the Nazi reign of terror, the re-mains of concentration camps have been safeguarded against erosionand vandalism and shaped into powerful reminders of the Holocaust,although often hotly contested ones (Figure 1-2). 4

There Icame across similar places—Nazi sites like the Gestapo headquartersand Reichs chancellery—that have lain vacant since just after WorldWar II and seem to be scarred permanently by shame.

Given the sense of shame cast over the community by the trialsand executions, there could have been little desire to call attention tothe site of the executions.

I found it remarkable that the location of such an important eventin the history of Salem and the nation not only was unmarked but hadbeen forgotten entirely.

Onasking about the location of their execution, I was directed toward alow rise of ground to the south of town called Gallows Hill. In the sev-enteenth century it lay just outside Salem Town. Today it is dottedwith modest homes, except where building is impossible along itscraggy slopes (Figure 1-1). Somewhere on this hill nineteen victims ofthe witchcraft scare were executed, but no one knows exactly where.

There is the Witch Museum, housed in a formerchurch, but it is less a museum than a small audi-torium for a sound-and-light show that tells thestory of the witchcraft trials in a series of vividtableaux.

At the time I was only vaguely aware of Salem’smore distant colonial past and the witchcraft trialsof the seventeenth century.

This book began in Salem, Massachusetts. Manyyears and miles have passed since my first visit,but it was in Salem where I first began to thinkabout how tragedy and violence have shaped theAmerican landscape.

All imply directly or indirectlythe quest for orientation in space and attachment to place: a territory, an alluvial plain, ahomeland, a paradisal garden, a city, a temple, or ceremonial structure. It is striking howmuch they consistently highlight the agency of the human body in the definition of bothspace and place.

he interior can be divided into fluid zones of purity and impurity and for-bidden and permitted behavior. Together, these elements affirm the home’s hurma, or sa-cral status.52 Similarly, a Hindu home might include a puja room with images of beloveddeities; a Catholic home in Mexico, a display of the Virgin of Guadalupe and ofrenda tomemorialize the dead; and a Buddhist home in Japan, a butsudan altar containing animage of the Buddha in memory of family ancestors.

Likewise, works of architectureare events that give shape and meaning to place. They can possess cosmic symbolismthat link building to body, like a Hindu temple or a Gothic cathedral.

Once created, humans laboredfor the gods, assuming their tasks of creating the built environment (shrines, fields,and irrigation canals) and making ritual offerings.3

Drawing exempla from the cosmologies of the ancient Mesopotamians, Romans,Hindus, medieval Christians, and Zuni people, among others, he posited that mythicalspace (i.e., religious space), is the most primal and affective of our spatial perceptions—they are distinct from aesthetic and scientific spatial concepts.

It found that modern mobilities, in-cluding immigration, contributed to a change in emphasis from a piety of place to one oftime.30

Formations of spatial orders of religious significance must also contend with the his-torical forces of desacralization, displacement and demolition, that is to say, ontolog-ical destructions of space.

A significant shift in post-Eliadean revisionist scholarship from archaic impe-rial spaces to modern ones occurred concomitantly in the 1990s.

The revisionist trend in the study of religious place inaugurated by Smith was de-veloped further by a number of other scholars specializing in different historical andcultural contexts.

These centers constituted the first cities, defined by (1) symbolic imitation of acelestial architype in design; (2) performance of rituals to maintain parallelism betweenmacrocosmos and microcosmos; (3) participation in the symbolism of the center as anaxis mundi; and (4) maintenance of cardinal orientation and axiality.

Eliade’s conception of sacred space has been both embraced and discredited for itsreliance on belief in a nonrational, transcendent cosmic power in order to interpret spa-tial phenomena.

To designate a place as sacred imposes no limit on its form or its meaning. It impliesno particular aesthetic or religious response. But if sacred places lack a common con-tent, they have a common role. To call a place sacred asserts that a place, its structure,and its symbols express fundamental cultural values and principles. By giving thesevisible form, the sacred place makes tangible the corporate identity of a people andtheir world.12

Place is security, space is freedom,” observedYi-Fu Tuan.11

n 1987 signals a spatial turn, or paradigm shift,that had occurred in the field by mid-twentieth century—a turn that subsided some-what only to be reinvigorated by the onset of a second turn early in the present cen-tury.8

hese two lines of inquiry, shaped initially bya Protestant outlook, engendered a variety of theories in the nineteenth and twen-tieth centuries about the origins or essence of religion. Neither space nor place wereof theoretical or analytical significance in these inquiries, except to provide context forwhatever topic happened to be under investigation. They were taken as passive settings“where things happened.”

It has become a fun-damental second-order category in the modern study of religions, a way of knowingwhat they are and discerning their meanings. But this has not always been the case. Thestudy of space has often been overlooked in the study of religion, which has long beengoverned by a quasi-theological interest in belief focused on theisms and scriptures inreaction to Enlightenment rationalism and the rise of secular sensibilities.

Despite their diversity these chapters all share a single conviction: that religiousspaces do not simply provide a convenient background for religious action or meaningsbut are also constituent of religious meaning and religious experience. As such, they playan active role in creating, expressing, broadcasting, maintaining, and transforming re-ligious meaning, experience, and religion itself.

Religious spaces are simultaneously individual and collective, personal and so-cial.

Power relationships rooted in concepts of genderhave also been explored by many scholars writing about religious space, and most re-cently, critical race theory has been similarly employed in thinking about racial powerstructures embedded within religioscapes (see, e.g., Sheikh, Saloojee in this volume).

Many of these ideas and methods have been adopted by scholars attempting to illu-minate the complex cultural and social processes, meanings, and relationships involvedin the creation and use of religious spaces.

The work of several influential theorists would eventually be adopted for the studyof religious space

Such sociologically and historically informed constructivist treatments of religiousspace gained increasing traction within the field of religious studies during the latterdecades of the century.

One key boundary is that between the sacred and the profane. Sacredthings and spaces, according to Durkheim, are special and set-apart things that par-ticipate in the construction and maintenance of the larger society while profane thingsand spaces, in contrast, are everyday things of importance only to the individual

The constructivist approach to religion and religious space also began to develop earlyin the twentieth century as the concept of “religion” attracted the attention of scholarsin the developing social sciences.

This substantive explanation of religious spaces (i.e., referring to the su-pernatural substance infusing them) resonated deeply with many religious practitionersbecause it foregrounded supernatural forces in its explanation of the creation and on-going character of such spaces and their subsequent ontological role in how humansperceive the world around them (Lane 2001).

In this vein, late nineteenth-century architects adopted various neomedieval featuresfor Christian churches, including the imposing, semimartial Romanesque architecturalvocabulary popularized by Henry Hobson Richardson, to suggest characteristics of sta-bility, permanence, and piety (Whiffen and Koeper 1983).

With the rise of social scientific perspectives and influences in the academy and beyondin the late nineteenth century, new approaches to the study of religious spaces began toemerge from the intersection of a growing scholarly interest in the category of “religion”itself, the professionalization of the field of architecture, and a growing demand for reli-gious buildings, particularly in the western hemisphere.

The impetus for this description, documentation, and restora-tion was as much a desire to historicize and thereby revitalize mid-nineteenth-centuryBritish identity as a desire to restore medieval piety. Nevertheless, these approaches re-main influential, for their legacy can be seen not only in the continued interest in archi-tectural style but also in the development of modern historic preservation efforts.

It would be several decades before scholars interested in re-ligious architecture would again pay witness to activities that took place within religiousbuildings.

As Western global exploration expanded throughout the eighteenth century, suchidentification of building practices with their cultures of origin or use proliferated inlearned circles, and during the Enlightenment not only religion itself but the buildingsand spaces in which religion occurred became an object for study.

During the Enlightenment period, the metadiscussion of designers and buildersshifted away from divine presence and began to attribute character to architectureand architectural style.

As scholars’ understanding of the role ofreligious space has changed over time, so, too, have their methods for studying it.

In sodoing, it seeks to enhance the richness of scholarly inquiry into religious spaces and in-tegrate the study of space more fully into our understandings of religion.

The aim of this volume is to sample a rangeof approaches, intentionally bringing diverse ways of understanding religious spacesinto conversation with one another.

The earliest known surviving architec-tural drawing, created over four millennia ago, demarcates a religious space: a templeto the god Ningirsu (Figure 0.1).

This ancient figure provides us with a striking reminder that religiousspace is created space, the material result of idea and activity, and that the productionof religious space is both as old as human time and as new as last week’s virtual services.

Throughout the past hundred years a number of philosophers and social scientists have asserted the disappearance ofthe sacred and predicted the demise of religion.

The problems of defining and investigating religion mentioned above are already expressive of the shifts in modernconsciousness regarding the sacred.

Phenomenologists of religion who use the concept “sacred” as a universal term for the basis of religion differ in theirestimation of the nature of the sacred manifestation.

Seasonal sacred calendars are especially important in predominantly agricultural societies. In the very order of nature,people see that different seasons have their distinct values. These differences are celebrated with spring festivals (whenthe world is re-created through ritual expressions of generation) and harvest festivals (of thanksgiving and ofprotecting the life force in seeds for the next spring). Here time is regarded as cyclical, and one’s life is marked bythose rituals in which one continually returns to the divine source

Eliade has elucidated this “dialectic of the sacred,” in whichthe sacred may be seen in virtually any sort of form in religious history: a stone, an animal, or the sea.

To acquire purity means to enter the sacred realm, which could be donethrough purification rituals or through the fasting, continence, and meditation of ascetic life.

The term sacred comes from Latin sacer (“set off, restricted”). A person or thing was designated as sacred when it wasunique or extraordinary. Closely related to sacer is numen (“mysterious power, god”).

The term sacred has been used from a wide variety of perspectives and given varying descriptive and evaluativeconnotations by scholars seeking to interpret the materials provided by anthropology and the history of religions.

In both of these cases,the sacred action establishes the relation between the divine and human worlds.

Scheler argued that thesacred (or infinite) was not limited to the experience of a finite object. While Scheler did not agree with Otto’s claimthat the holy is experienced through a radically different kind of awareness, he did agree with Otto that the awarenessof the sacred is not simply the result of conditioning social and psychological forces. Though he criticized FriedrichSchleiermacher, an early 19th-century Protestant theologian, for being too subjective in his definition of religion as“the consciousness of being absolutely dependent on God,”

The sun, for example, is the embodiment of the power of life, the source of all humanconsciousness, the central pivot for the eternal rhythm and order of existence. Or, a river, such as the Nile for theancient Egyptians and the Ganges for the Hindu, gave witness to the power of life incarnated in geography. Sacredmountains (e.g., Sinai for Jews, Kailāsa for Hindus, Fujiyama for Japanese) were particular loci of divine power, law,and truth.

For Durkheim, sacredness referred to those thingsin society that were forbidden or set apart;

In sacrificial rites it is important to duplicate theoriginal (divine) act; and because creation is variously conceived in different religious traditions, different forms arepreserved: the burning or crushing of the “corn mother,” the crushing of the soma stalks, the slaughter of the lambwithout blemish, the blood spilling of a sacred person, such as the firstborn.

It was during the first quarter of the 20th century that the concept of the sacred became dominant in the comparativestudy of religions.