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Sam Turner's important new interpretation of early medieval patterns of landscape development traces landscape change in the South West from the introduction of Christianity to the Norman Conquest (AD c. 450-1070). It stresses the significance of political and religious ideology in both the 'Celtic' west (especially Cornwall) and the 'Anglo-Saxon' east (especially the Wessex counties of Devon, Somerset, Wiltshire and Dorset). Using innovative new research methods, and making use of archaeology, place-name evidence, historical sources and land-use patterns, it challenges previous work on the subject by suggesting that the two regions have much in common. Using modern mapping techniques to explore land-use trends, Turner advances a new model for the evolution of ecclesiastical institutions in south-west England. He shows that the early development of Christianity had an impact on the countryside that remains visible in the landscape we see today. Accessibly written with a glossary of terms and a comprehensive bibliography, the book will appeal to both veterans and newcomers to landscape archaeology.
Landscapes across Europe were transformed, both physically and conceptually, during the early medieval period (c AD 400-1200), and these changes were bound up with the conversion to Christianity and the development of ecclesiastical power structures. While Christianity represented a more or less common set of beliefs and ideas, early medieval societies were characterized by vibrant diversity: much can potentially be learned about these societies by comparing and contrasting how they adapted Christianity to suit local circumstances. This is the first book to adopt a comparative landscape approach to this crucial subject.
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.
The Making of Christian Communities sheds light on one of the most crucial periods in the development of the Christian faith. It considers the development and spread of Christianity between Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, and includes analysis of the formation and development of Christian communities in a variety of arenas, ranging from Late Roman Cappadocia and Constantinople to the court of Charlemagne and the twelfth-century province of Rheims, France during the twelfth century. The rise and development of Christianity in the Roman and Post-Roman world has been exhaustively studied on many different levels, political, legal, social, literary and religious. However, the basic question of how Christians of Late Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages formed themselves into communities of believers has sometimes been lost from sight. This volume explores the idea that survival of the Christian faith depended upon the making of these communities, something that the Christians of this period were themselves acutely - and sometimes acrimoniously - aware.
Dubbed "a heroic gate-crasher" by New York Times bestselling author Glennon Doyle, Brian D. McLaren explores reasons to leave or stay within the church and if so how... "Brian's new book on remaining Christian knocks it out of the ballpark in terms of framing and naming the questions. I cannot stop reading it. Thank you, Brian!" —Fr. Richard Rohr, OFM, founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation, author of The Universal Christ "Any thoughtful Christian has been asking the questions McLaren tackles here, but many of us are afraid to voice them aloud. In Do I Stay Christian? we’re gifted a gentle guide who opens ideas and voices the questions we cannot, naming our frustration, fear, and hesitant hope." —Rev. Dr. Amy Butler, former Senior Minister, The Riverside Church; Founder, Invested Faith Do I Stay Christian? addresses in public the powerful question that surprising numbers of people—including pastors, priests, and other religious leaders—are asking in private. Picking up where Faith After Doubt leaves off, Do I Stay Christian? is not McLaren's attempt to persuade Christians to dig in their heels or run for the exit. Instead, he combines his own experience with that of thousands of people who have confided in him over the years to help readers make a responsible, honest, ethical decision about their religious identity. There is a way to say both yes and no to the question of staying Christian, McLaren says, by shifting the focus from whether we stay Christian to how we stay human. If Do I Stay Christian? is the question you're asking—or if it's a question that someone you love is asking—this is the book you've been waiting for.
Negotiating the Landscape explores the question of how medieval religious identities were shaped and modified by interaction with the natural environment. Focusing on the Benedictine monastic community of Stavelot-Malmedy in the Ardennes, Ellen F. Arnold draws upon a rich archive of charters, property and tax records, correspondence, miracle collections, and saints' lives from the seventh to the mid-twelfth century to explore the contexts in which the monks' intense engagement with the natural world was generated and refined. Arnold argues for a broad cultural approach to medieval environmental history and a consideration of a medieval environmental imagination through which people perceived the nonhuman world and their own relation to it. Concerned to reassert medieval Christianity's vitality and variety, Arnold also seeks to oppose the historically influential view that the natural world was regarded in the premodern period as provided by God solely for human use and exploitation. The book argues that, rather than possessing a single unifying vision of nature, the monks drew on their ideas and experience to create and then manipulate a complex understanding of their environment. Viewing nature as both wild and domestic, they simultaneously acted out several roles, as stewards of the land and as economic agents exploiting natural resources. They saw the natural world of the Ardennes as a type of wilderness, a pastoral haven, and a source of human salvation, and actively incorporated these differing views of nature into their own attempts to build their community, understand and establish their religious identity, and relate to others who shared their landscape.
What did it take to cause the Roman aristocracy to turn to Christianity, changing centuries-old beliefs and religious traditions? Michele Salzman takes a fresh approach to this much-debated question. Focusing on a sampling of individual aristocratic men and women as well as on writings and archeological evidence, she brings new understanding to the process by which pagan aristocrats became Christian, and Christianity became aristocratic. Roman aristocrats would seem to be unlikely candidates for conversion to Christianity. Pagan and civic traditions were deeply entrenched among the educated and politically well-connected. Indeed, men who held state offices often were also esteemed priests in the pagan state cults: these priesthoods were traditionally sought as a way to reinforce one's social position. Moreover, a religion whose texts taught love for one's neighbor and humility, with strictures on wealth and notions of equality, would not have obvious appeal for those at the top of a hierarchical society. Yet somehow in the course of the fourth and early fifth centuries Christianity and the Roman aristocracy met and merged. Examining the world of the ruling class--its institutions and resources, its values and style of life--Salzman paints a fascinating picture, especially of aristocratic women. Her study yields new insight into the religious revolution that transformed the late Roman Empire.
This volume provides a theoretically and empirically-grounded study of the significance of landscape in the experience of Christian pilgrimage across different denominations and its intersection with cultural heritage and tourism. The book focuses on pilgrimages to Meteora (Greece), Subiaco (Italy) and the Isle of Man. These are each sites of scenic beauty that boast a rich heritage associated respectively to Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic and Ecumenical/ Protestant denominations. The study discusses different Christian theologies, practices and perspectives on the nature and the purpose of pilgrimage in these traditions. It draws on participant experiential accounts, archival research, and interviews with clergy, laity and local stakeholders. Special attention is paid to the themes of sacred space and practice, aesthetics, mobilities, embodiment and performance, emotional geographies, theology, cultural heritage, consumption and commodification, and the pilgrim-tourist continuum.
By presenting case studies from across Eastern and Western Medieval Europe, this volume aims to open up a Europe-wide debate on the variety of relations and contexts between ecclesiastical buildings and their surrounding landscapes between the 5th and 15th centuries AD.
Drawing on first person accounts, Asia in the Making of Christianity studies conversion in the lives of Christians throughout Asia, past and present. Fifteen contributors treat perennial questions about conversion: continuity and discontinuity, conversion and communal conflict, and the politics of conversion. Some study individuals (An Chunggŭn of Korea, Liang Fa of China, Nehemiah Goreh of India), while others treat ethnolinguistic groups or large-scale movements. Converts sometimes appear as proto-nationalists, while others are suspected of cultural treason. Some transition effortlessly from leadership in one religious community into Christian ministry, while others re-convert to new forms of Christianity. The accounts collected here underscore the complexity of conversion, balancing individual agency with broader social trends and combining micro- with macrocontextual approaches.