Landscapes of Christianity

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).

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.

Foreword, Kim Knibbe (University of Groningen, the Netherlands)1. Introduction, Amos S. Ron (Ashkelon Academic College, Israel) and James S. Bielo (Miami University, USA)PART I: Destinations2. Holy Quarter: Reshaping Urban Landscapes of Yekaterinburg in Post-Secular Russia, Jeanne Kormina (National Research University, Russia)3. Galactic Shrines and the Catholic Cult of St. Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, Michael Di Giovine (West Chester University, USA)4. Domesticating the Landscape and Healing the Physical and Social Body at Lourdes, John Eade (Roehampton University, UK)5. Crucifix and Dirt: Catholic and Indigenous Origins of the Holy Earth of the Santuario de Chimayo, Brett Hendrickson (Lafayette College, USA)6. "A Lineal Temple": Pilgrimage and Sacred Space in Contemporary Mormonism, Sara M. Patterson (Hanover College, USA)PART II: Temporalities7. From the Gods' Mountains to the Messiah's Glade: Christian Landscapes of Africa and Asia, Jonathan Miles-Watson (Durham University, UK) and Sitna Quiroz (Durham University, UK)8. Geography as Eschatology: Moral Freedom and Prophecy Fulfilment on Land and at Sea, Joseph Webster (Queen's University-Belfast, UK)9. Imagining an Ethnic Ecumene: Evangelical Landscapes as Gentile, Jewish, and Native American, Rebekka King (Middle Tennessee State University, USA)PART III: Transformations10. Landscape as Expressive Resource in Biblical Themed Environments, James S. Bielo (Miami University, USA)11. When Mountains Move: Sacred Performance and Overlapping Topographies in Athonite Processions, Veronica della Dora (Royal Holloway-University of London, UK)12. The Landscape of Sacred Groves in the New Testament: The Mt. of Beatitudes, the Garden of Gethsemane, and the Garden Tomb, Amos S. Ron (Ashkelon Academic College, Israel)Afterword, Simon Coleman (University of Toronto, Canada)BibliographyIndex