In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Introduction Louis P. Nelson What do we mean by sacred space? Consider for a moment scenes in an American city. Most mornings, Chicago’s elevated trains—the “El”—carry me downtown from my North Side apartment. On my way to the train, I pass an unassuming frame house with an ever-changing array of plastic and concrete yard ornaments ranging from St. Francis and doves to Mickey and Santa. A mailbox on the fence offers blessings to the passerby. A block later, cheekby -jowl houses give way to the singular monumentality of Wrigley Field, the historic baseball stadium that has since 1914 served as home to the Chicago Cubs. Jersey shops and sports bars line the streets around the stadium like market stalls selling icons and holy water before a medieval cathedral. The view from the train includes domes and steeples rising above the two- and threestory buildings that define the horizon of the North Side. The train pauses at Fullerton, offering a glimpse of DePaul University, where a seven-story portrait of St. Vincent de Paul (d. 1660) in full clerical garb surveys the campus from the side of a plain brick dormitory. Most mornings, newspapers and radio headsets effectively shield passengers from each other. But on one occasion we rode with a prophetess who spends her time boldly exorcising the city’s trains from the demons of hate, racism, and drugs, a ritual she has kept for more than a decade. During the holidays, a tall brass menorah and a beautiful lifesize nativity with delicately painted figures, real hay, and a hovering angel share Nelson_AmerSanctuary 11/30/05 2:32 PM Page 1 the showroom floor of a new-car dealership, where enormous red bows rest on the hoods of shiny new BMWs. My commute ends at the monumental façade of the Newberry Library, whose Romanesque arches access relics dense with spiritual power, from illuminated manuscripts to video of twentieth-century dance. Domestic pieties, popular practice, public display—this glimpse of Chicago is ample evidence that the American landscape is dense with religious allusion, but how much of it is actually sacred space? Certainly churches, temples, and mosques locate the sacred in the American landscape. But communities also fume at the desecration of public monuments , and museums are often described as preserving icons of American culture .1 Families speak boldly about the sanctuary of the American home, and we have a tradition of finding the sacred in the geography of the land itself.2 Americans also seem comfortable allowing the sacred to spill past those spaces designed to contain it, blurring the boundaries between the sacred, the commercial , and the political in everyday life. Visual expressions of American religion, for example, seem to surface persistently in the public sphere, complicating our ideological separation of church and state.3 Even the shopping mall—the cathedral of American materialism—has been offered as the “new religious image” of American culture.4 The architecture of many “megachurches” suggests that some American Christians quite comfortably combine the religious with the commercial and other expressions of popular culture.5 From New York’s Frick to food courts, monumental cathedrals to store-front churches, Yosemite National Park to our own backyard, the American understanding of sacred space is multifarious to say the least. Our penchant for evoking the sacred when referring to any place deemed important or set apart has led Peter Williams, an eminent scholar of American religion, to worry that sacred space has become virtually meaningless as an analytical category.6 This collection of essays argues, instead, that the sacred has been and continues to be a powerful cognitive space in the landscape of the American imagination and is a category worthy of greater scholarly rigor and reflection. The complexities of sacred space in American culture require an equally complex method of examination that will necessarily be interdisciplinary. Scholars of the built environment too often limit the sacred to places of worship, and theologians similarly constrain religious experience too frequently to institutionally sanctioned ritual; few allow for the practical reality that religious meaning seeps past both institutional and intellectual constructs. Broad patterns of religious meaning often generated by scholars of comparative religions seem to fall short of the nuances of specific historical circumstances. Conversely, cultural historians seem too quick to embrace religion as a powerful agent of some larger sociopolitical enterprise, often failing to grapple successfully with ques2 American Sanctuary Nelson_AmerSanctuary 11/30/05 2:32 PM...

Share