American Trappist Monasteries and the Changing Spiritual Landscape

Spiritual landscapes arise from a dynamic relationship of spiritual beliefs, ritual practices, and embodied encounters in place. They can contain multiple spiritual and non‐spiritual elements that change over time. This paper offers an appreciation of the diverse, overlapping, and ambivalent meanings emerging from Trappist monasteries in the United States. With origins tracing back to eleventh‐century France, Trappist monasteries are Roman Catholic intentional communities belonging to the Order of Cistercians of the Strict Observance. Attempts to establish monasteries in the American scene began around the turn of the nineteenth century. Contemplation, a receptive state of interior spiritual silence, represents one significant component of Trappist spirituality. Like other aspects of the spiritual landscape, contemplation has been reprioritized as Trappist monks and nuns confront situations like political conflict, changes in monastic leadership, and economic problems. These places continue to address challenges and possibilities for reinvention as they become open to shifting social contexts.     

Markets,religion, regulation: Kosher,halal and Hindu vegetarianism in global perspective

Most recent scholarship on moral economies or religious markets argues for the compatibility of economies/markets and religious practices in particular national or regional contexts. However, over the last couple of decades or so religious markets have entered a new phase characterized by new forms of regulation, certification and standardization on a global scale. Building on research on global kosher (a Hebrew term meaning “fit” or “proper”), halal (an Arabic word that literally means “permissible” or “lawful”) and Hindu vegetarianism this paper argues that these economies or markets to a large extent are conditioned by and themselves condition forms of transnational governmentality, that is, new and often overlapping practices of government and grassroots politics. I explore religious economies and markets at three interrelated levels of the social scale: state and non-state regulation, the marketplace and consumers. Epistemologically, comparison is used as a powerful conceptual mechanism that fixes attention on kosher, halal and Hindu vegetarian similarities and differences.     

A Place for Buddha in Wollongong,New South Wales? Territorial rules in the place-making of sacred spaces

A Buddhist temple in Berkeley, Wollongong, may at first appear puzzling given that few Buddhists lived there. Indeed, the suburb was home to predominantly those Anglo-Celtic Australians most marginalised by the structural changes to the city's economic base. This problem is explored within the social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion operating within the local politics of place-making. Drawing upon the concept of a progressive sense to place revealed that discourses of support for the temple drew heavily on imagining Australia and Wollongong as multicultural and the temple as an exotic object of the Orient, worthy of tourist visitation. A Buddhist temple provided the city with a source of cultural vitality and enrichment. Imagined as a tourist attraction, a place to visit, rather than as sacred space, a place to worship, a Buddhism sect was perhaps in this way made less threatening to local Christian residents. These results further support arguments that suggest a redundancy to the fixed notions of place as bounded territory and how territorial rules that define whether something, or someone, is appropriately placed requires interrogating the connectedness between social powers and the powers of place.     

Ethics and public perception of climate change: Exploring the Christian voices in the US public debate

Climate change raises many questions with strong moral and ethical dimensions that are important to address in climate-policy formation and international negotiations. Particularly in the United States, the public discussion of these dimensions is strongly influenced by religious groups and leaders. Over the past few years, many religious groups have taken positions on climate change, highlighting its ethical dimensions. This paper aims to explore these ethical dimensions in the US public debate in relation to public support for climate policies. It analyzes in particular the Christian voices in the US public debate on climate change by typifying the various discourses. Three narratives emerge from this analysis: ‘conservational stewardship’ (conserving the ‘garden of God’ as it was created), ‘developmental stewardship’ (turning the wilderness into a garden as it should become) and ‘developmental preservation’ (God's creation is good and changing; progress and preservation should be combined). The different narratives address fundamental ethical questions, dealing with stewardship and social justice, and they provide proxies for public perception of climate change in the US. Policy strategies that pay careful attention to the effects of climate change and climate policy on the poor – in developing nations and the US itself – may find support among the US population. Religious framings of climate change resonate with the electorates of both progressive and conservative politicians and could serve as bridging devices for bipartisan climate-policy initiatives.     

Cultures of lights

This paper is part of a larger project, looking at electricity access in rural India. For the project, a nine months long ethnographic research was carried out in five villages in Bihar, an eastern state of India. It involved looking at various sources of light – grid electricity, solar lanterns, biomass micro-grids and kerosene oil. The paper tries to understand, and explain, the cultural notions that dictate peoples’ specific lighting practices and lighting practices that propagate particular cultural notions. The paper argues that, through the mediation of materiality, light cultures (cultivates and propagates) culture and culture cultures light. It does this by engaging with three key ideas. First, it argues that light has a critical role in establishing and reinforcing honour. Following this, it examines light’s role in hospitality. Lastly, it connects light to the religious beliefs among Hindus, and looks at how culture affects the materiality of light. The paper approaches what light does and what it means as emerging from a material-culture assemblage, which embodies the external and the internal, the political and the productive, the corporal and the conceptual, the material, moral, and the sensible. From this, light emerges with dual – material and non-material – properties, as it interacts with culture.     

Religious values and family upbringing as antecedents of food waste avoidance

Consumer intention to avoid food waste is determined by various socio-demographic and psychographic/psychological factors. While many of these factors have been well studied, some remain under-researched. This is the case for religious values and family upbringing that may represent strong antecedents of personal norms towards food waste avoidance. This study tests the role of these factors on a sample (n = 566) of consumers in Poland, a society with strong religious traditions and family ties. The results indicate that religious values play an important role in family upbringing which, by influencing personal social and environmental motives, mediates the effect on personal norms to avoid food waste. This suggests that religious leaders should be engaged in the design of food waste prevention campaigns specifically targeting parents. This is to trigger a cross-generational spillover effect whereby family morals on food waste avoidance are transferred from parents to children and reinforced by religious values.     

试论宗教与地理学

宗教地理学是人文地理学的一个分支,国外早已进行了这方面的研究,我国这方面的研究刚起步。作者试图从宗教与地理之间的关系进行初步探讨。     

Institutionalised religion: sacred texts and Jewish spatial practice

Institutionalised religion, as a powerful force in the structuring of the daily lives of probably the majority of the world’s population, is a field of social research to which geographers can usefully contribute. This paper examines ancient and contemporary forms of Judaism, exploring the underlying codes and regulations designed to structure every aspect of life. The first part of the paper examines institutionalised uses of space in ancient times, as recorded in the sacred Jewish text of the Talmud. Through the sacred geography of the great Temple in Jerusalem and the legal authority of the religious court to punish offenders, the social system was (in principle at least) highly ordered and regulated. The second part examines the institutionalisation of the religion in contemporary times, which for orthodox Jews involves attempting to practise and maintain these same ancient codes and regulations. Practising ancient ways of life in contemporary (post)modern contexts can be extremely difficult, however, which I discuss with reference to the proposals of the religious authorities in Manchester, England, to construct an eruv; a legalistic device consisting of poles and wires which changes the classification of space, allowing (in particular) the elderly, infirm and parents with young children to travel on the Sabbath. The device faces criticism from secular and religious sources over the rights to ‘claim space’ and the religious legalistic viability of the project.