Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality

by Belden C. Lane
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Background
Content
Key Terms
Dialogue
References
External Links

Background

Belden C. Lane’s Landscapes of the Sacred: Geography and Narrative in American Spirituality was first published in 1988. A second, expanded edition was published by Johns Hopkins University Press in 2001. Lane is Professor of Theology at St. Louis University with a profound interest in the relationship between Christian spirituality and the natural world. A Protestant theologian drawing on a variety of spiritual and textual traditions as faculty member of a Catholic university, Lane has been described as a “Presbyterian minister teaching at a Roman Catholic university telling Jewish stories at the Vedanta Society.” Trained at both Fuller and Princeton Theological Seminaries, Lane investigates the connection between geography and faith and the role that ritual plays in the transformation of both landscape and self into sacred spaces.

The second edition of Landscapes of the Sacred provides important updates to the original text, which Lane acknowledges as heavily influenced by the work of Mircea Eliade. Recognizing a lack of critical reflection in the first edition, Lane reorganized the second printing to include cultural interpretations of place that emerged in the scholarly works of Robert Orsi, Colleen McDannell, Edward Linenthal and others during the late 1980s and 1990s. Lane describes the second edition as an “expanded dialogue” that balances his enduring resonance with Eliade with critical perspectives on the “cultural construction and phenomenological integrity of sites considered sacred” (x-xi).

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Content

Lane investigates the experience and history of spirituality through the lens of sacred space in the American landscape. Rejecting scholarly distinctions between religion and culture, Lane uses the term spirituality to engage the particularity of experience, rooted in time and space, within the context of a universal, “enduring presence” of the holy (10). Writing across the disciplinary boundaries of history, theology, and cultural studies, Lane mines a variety of scholars and methodologies to contextualize the sacred within a “spatially fixed reality” (10). Examining tensions between “cultural, religious, and ecological forces that constitute the identity of a given site” (5), Lane is particularly interested in the spatial aspect of personal and collective identity formation. For Lane, “who we are, in other words, is inseparably a part of where we are” (6).

As both author and subject of Landscapes of the Sacred, Lane interrogates the liminal space between the “inherent” mystery and “constructed”meaning of place and their respective academic genealogies. Positioning himself “between” disciplines, Lane searches for language that affords entry into the meaning of the landscapes he describes. Concerned with limitations of both objective analysis and engaged participation, Lane emphasizes the poet as an important figure capable of describing a “sense of place and one’s experience of it” (11). Ultimately crafting a “geography of the spirit,” Lane uses case studies from across the American landscape to highlight experiential and constructed meanings attributed to sacred spaces, asking the reader to consider a “new way of seeing” attuned to both a sensitivity of religious experience and critical deconstruction.

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Key Terms

In Part One of Landscapes of the Spiritual, Lane introduces key terms associated with a variety of scholars and methodologies, including Ricoeur (hermeneutic circle), Heidegger (dasein), Eliade (sacred/profane, axis mundi), Aristotle (topos), Plato (chora), Bakhtin (chronos/kairos, chronotopes), Geertz (blurred genres), Husserl (intersubjectivity) and J.Z. Smith, to contextualize his own framework for a geography of spirituality. The list below consists primarily of the terms Lane privileges as his own theory.

spirituality

ordinary/extraordinary — outside/inside — constructed/essential — religion/culture — nature/nurture — modern/postmodern

place-tale (16) or storied places (59)

poet’s third eye (11) / poetic consciousness (60)

place, culture and sacredness (57-85)

transformation by initiation (30) or by rituals of practice (39)

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Dialogue

Lane positions this work in the interstices of essentialist and constructivist scholarly discourse about the mystery and meaning of place. Part One of Landscapes of the Sacred establishes Lane’s interest in both the “individual experience of place” and the “range of scholarly approaches to the study of sacred space” (39). Searching for a middle ground between “outside” investigations of cultural constructions of reality and “inside” perceptions and experiences of space, Lane’s theoretical framework pays homage to scholars on both sides of this academic debate.

In Chapter One, drawing heavily from Mircea Eliade and his spatial terminology that acknowledges sacred space as an active agent irrupting into and across landscapes, Lane identifies four axioms or phenomenological categories that describe the perception of space. Working with Eliade’s classifications of sacred/profane, ordinary/extraordinary, center/periphery, Lane introduces J.Z. Smith’s critical contributions that contest these bounded binaries, as well as Heidegger’s distinction between “being” and “dwelling” in place. Understanding these axioms as critical to our understanding of the religious imagination and experience, Lane describes sacred space as “storied place” that requires poetic insight and analysis.

In his discussion of the scholarly examination of landscape (Chapter Two), Lane begins with the transformation of location/space (Aristotle’s topo) into an energy field/place that captivates the imaginary (Plato’s chora). Inserting time into ritual transformation, Lane introduces the distinction between a repetitive, temporal process (chronos) and an unique and significant event (kairos). Drawing on Bakhtin’s chronotopes, “points in the geography of a community where time and space intersect and fuse” (264), Lane experiences the combined “situation of chora and a moment of kairos” (41) as sacred. Understanding space as an active partner in his dialogue, Lane points to John Muir and Gary Snyder as authors attuned to the ways in which space “talks back” (41). Lane balances his interest in the recovery of the “embodied and imaginative way that the natural environment participates with us in the creation of meaning and the mystery of experience” (42) with Ricoeur’s hermeneutic circle that moves from first naiveté through a hermeneutics of suspicion to a second naiveté that privileges wonder within theoretical discourse.

Within the historiography of sacred place, Lane identifies three interpretive approaches; ontological, cultural, and phenomenological. Positioning these methodologies along a spectrum, Lane describes the contributions and limitations of each approach, emphasizing the phenomenological school in particular. Lane’s emphasis on Husserl’s intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty’s embodied perception, and Edward Casey’s description of “moments of Nature” (56), points towards his affinity with this particular school and methodology. Recognizing nonetheless the importance of all three methods, Lane privileges the intersection of place, culture, and sacredness as the foundation of the storied places in the American landscape (57).

In addition to academic prose rooted in theory and methodology, Landscapes of the Sacred demonstrates that Lane is in deep and perpetual dialogue with himself. Using his own experience of sacred space as reflexive examples throughout the text, Lane provides a scholarly memoir that attempts to engage “every dimension of the sacred” within “new paradigms of interpretation” (60).

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References

For a discussion of the first edition of Landscapes of the Sacred, see the review by Catherine L. Albanese in The Journal of Religion , Vol. 71, No. 3 (Jul., 1991), pp. 476-477.

For a discussion of the second edition, see Peter W. Williams’ review in the Journal of the American Academy of Religion , Vol. 70, No. 3 (Sep., 2002), pp. 593-609.