Landscapes of Christianity - (Bloomsbury Studies in Religion, Space and Place) by James S Bielo & Amos S Ron

Book Synopsis

How do Christians make relationships with land central to their faith? How have the realities of materiality, geography, and ecology shaped Christian territories of belonging and theologies of territory? What social-economic-political conditions surround exchanges between religion and nature?

This book explores how Christianity intersects with nature to create unique religious landscapes. Case studies range from the Mormon Trail across the USA completed by thousands every year, to the Catholic devotional cult of and shrine to St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina. Contributors examine the entangled forms of agency between nature and culture that are at work as Christians produce, consume, experience, imagine, inhabit, manage, and struggle over formations of land.

Focusing on Christian engagements with land forms in the early 21st century, this book advances the spatial turn in the study of religion, contributes to the anthropology of religion and the study of global Christianities, as well as our understanding of the relationship between Christianity, space and place.

About the Author

James S. Bielo is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, USA. He is the author of four books, most recently Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park (2018), and is the co-founder and lead curator for the digital scholarship project Materializing the Bible.

Amos S. Ron a retired independent researcher specializing in the geography of religions, Christian travel and pilgrimage, religious culinary tourism, religious themed-environments, and sacred site place-making and management. He is currently a research fellow at the department of French Culture at Bar Ilan University, Israel. He is the co-author of Contemporary Christian Travel: Pilgrimage, Practice and Place (2019, with DJ Timothy).