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The subject before him is enormous, yet he succeeds in giving a comprehensive and provocative evaluation. If this reviewer were preparing a course on Christian spirituality, Spaces for the Sacred would be required reading.
In Sheldrake's competent hands, place offers a locus for deepening our understanding of both religious experience and identity.
This is a creative, thought-provoking work of scholarship that offers a multifaceted exploration of the idea of place within the Christian tradition. Sheldrake's intimate familiarity with theological language and thought enable him to do what no one else before him has done, namely set the current 'crisis of place' against a centuries-old backdrop of thinking and reflection on place as a key category for understanding religious experience and identity.
Philip Sheldrake has enriched and deepened the idea of place by bringing history, cultural studies, geography, various human sciences, and literature together with theology and spirituality. He manages to do justice to the particularity of place in its many dimensions, and to connect in an accessible style with ordinary personal and social life in the twenty-first century. Above all he helps readers to identify and 'position' themselves in relation to the places in their lives, and to open up new possibilities of inhabiting them.
'To be a person,' Philip Sheldrake tells us, quoting the philosopher Heidegger, is literally to 'be there,' Dasein, thus to be in a particular place. Drawing on a wide range of writers, from Duns Scotus to Simon Schama, as well as on poetry and his memories of his own childhood in Dorset, Sheldrake offers a rich and original way of meditating on the importance of place and places in our lives.
At a time when—in the modern metropolis—time has been usurped by space, and space has become everywhere the same, the same fluorescent lit shopping malls and suburban lawns, Philip Sheldrake's Hulsean Lectures seek to reclaim 'space' as a fundamental Christian category, as the space which God makes in coming to us at a particular time and place. Inspired by Duns Scotus and Michel de Certeau, and the Ignatian Exercises, Sheldrake explores the tensions in Christian tradition between the particular and the universal stability and pilgrimage, the places we inhabit and from which we must depart. This gently passionate book will be welcomed by all concerned with traversing the modern city, and who wish to journey with the man who made space for others, but had nowhere to lay his head.
About
Book Details
Publication Date
Status
Available
Trim Size
5.5
x 8.25
Pages
214
ISBN
9780801868610
Table of Contents
Preface
Chapter 1. A Sense of Place
Chapter 2. Place in Christian Tradition
Chapter 3. The Eucharist and Practicing Catholic Place
Chapter 4. The Practice of Place: Monasteries and Utopias
Chapter 5. The
Preface
Chapter 1. A Sense of Place
Chapter 2. Place in Christian Tradition
Chapter 3. The Eucharist and Practicing Catholic Place
Chapter 4. The Practice of Place: Monasteries and Utopias
Chapter 5. The Mystical Way: Transcending Places of Limit
Chapter 6. Re-Placing the City?
Notes
Bibliography
Index
