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Background: In the United States there are roughly three million births a year, ranging from cesarean to natural births. A major aspect of the birthing process is related to the healing environment, and how that helps or harms healing for the mother and child. Using the theoretical framework, Theory of Supportive Care Settings (TSCS), this study aimed to explore what is necessary to have a safe and sacred healing environment for mothers. Method: This study utilized an updated Qualitative Interpretive Meta-synthesis (QIMS) design called QIMS-DTT [deductive theory testing] to answer the research question, What are mother's experiences of environmental factors contributing to a supportive birthing environment within healthcare settings? Results: Key terms were run through multiple databases, which resulted in 5,688 articles. After title and abstract screening, 43 were left for full-text, 12 were excluded, leaving 31 to be included in the final QIMS. Five main themes emerged from analysis: 1) Service in the environment, 2) Recognizing oneself within the birthing space, 3) Creating connections with support systems, 4) Being welcomed into the birthing space, and 5) Feeling safe within the birthing environment. Conclusions: Providing a warm and welcoming birth space is crucial for people who give birth to have positive experiences. Providing spaces where the person can feel safe and supported allows them to find empowerment in the situation where they have limited control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Note argues for a change in the Supreme Court’s treatment of free exercise claims over Indigenous sacred sites. First, this Note reasons that, in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Ass’n, the Court set an impossibly high standard for parties bringing sacred site free exercise claims against the government. This insurmountable standard, masking itself as strict scrutiny, implicitly precludes any claimant from prevailing against a government action designated for a sacred site. Further, statutes aimed at protecting religious liberty have resolved little, leaving no choice but to rework the standard. Next, this Note delves into three preexisting theories from like-minded critics of Lyng and analyzes the pros and cons of their proposed approaches to sacred site free exercise claims. Lastly, this Note sets forth a novel test that modifies the framework courts currently use in free exercise jurisprudence. Appreciating the fundamental distinctions between religious land and religious acts, this new test is uniquely tailored to address claims over sacred lands. This proposed test seeks to (1) give religious claimants a realistic opportunity to meet their initial burden in court, (2) put sacred site claims on equal footing with other free exercise claims, and (3) address the Supreme Court’s concerns with overexpanding free exercise doctrine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, many archaeological excavations focus on precontact era Native American sites, and for the majority of American archaeology's existence, these have included a vast number of burial and sacred sites. When the human remains of Native American Ancestors, or remnants of sacred and ceremonial objects, are found, what implications does this have for the soil in which they rested? In addition to exploring questions regarding how backdirt is defined and assessed, we consider how backdirt may be interpreted as ecofact, as material culture, and even as NAGPRA-eligible funerary material or human remains. We hope to demonstrate that backdirt, as an example of some of the most insignificant archaeological material, poses interesting questions relating to interpretations of context, as well as consultation and collaboration with Indigenous communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary Pagan nature sanctuaries across the United States feature practices such as ecosystem restoration, species preservation, and green burial. Pagans ritualize these practices in ways that both express and constitute reverential or intimate relations between humans, soil, plants, rocks, nonhuman animals, and spiritual beings. Their nature sanctuaries also express particular relationships with the more-than-human world through creating various kinds of sacred spaces, including shrines and altars. Because they are separated from most visitors' daily lives, these sanctuaries work for many visitors as portals to a different state of consciousness in which human and nonhuman nature are experienced in powerful ways. This paper will explore the ritualized ways that environmentally conscious practices are promoted and engaged with at these sanctuaries. I will focus particularly on two sets of tensions: 1) leaving spaces wild and domesticating them and 2) natural burial and ecosystem restoration that brings species back to life. These varied practices reveal different ways of understanding 'nature' and 'the wild'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines and theorizes the vernacular sacred as a different type of space, neither entirely private nor public, created by spontaneous memorials found along the side of the road in the United States. These memorials exist in public space yet are constructed by and serve a private audience of mourners. The bereaved act as agents of production when they build and maintain the memorials which exist in a type of bubble of private sacred space – existing simultaneously with and in public space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Meaningful access to sacred sites is among the most important principles to the religious exercise of Indigenous peoples, yet tribes have been repeatedly thwarted by the federal government in their efforts to vindicate this practice of their religion. The colonial, state, and federal governments of this Nation have been desecrating and destroying Native American sacred sites since before the Republic was formed. Unfortunately, the callous destruction of Indigenous sacred sites is not just a troubling relic of the past. Rather, the threat to sacred sites and cultural resources continues today in the form of spoliation from development, as well as in the significant barriers to meaningful access Indigenous peoples face. Scholars concerned about government failure to protect Indigenous sacred sites on government property have generally agreed that the problem stems from the unique nature of Indigenous spiritual traditions as being too distinct from non-Indigenous religious traditions familiar to courts and legislators, and therefore eluding protection afforded to other traditions. By contrast, this Article approaches the problem from an entirely different angle: we focus instead on the similarities between government coercion with respect to Indigenous religious exercise and other non-Indigenous religious practices. We illustrate how the debate about sacred sites unwittingly partakes in longstanding philosophical debates about the nature of coercion itself — a phenomenon that has previously gone unnoticed by scholars. This Article argues that whether or not one formally labels the government’s actions as “coercive,” the important question is whether the government is bringing to bear its sovereign power in a way that inhibits the important ideal of religious voluntarism — the ability of individuals to voluntarily practice their religious exercise consistent with their own free self-development. Indeed, this is precisely the sort of question courts ask when evaluating government burdens on non-Indigenous religious exercise. The failure to ask this same question about voluntarism for Indigenous religious practices has created a double standard, wherein the law recognizes a much more expansive notion of coercion for contexts impacting non-Indigenous religious practices, and a much narrower conception of coercion when it comes to Indigenous sacred sites. This egregious double standard in the law ought to be revisited. Doing so would have two important implications. First, when government interference with religious voluntarism is viewed clearly, tribal members and Indigenous practitioners should be able to prove a prima facie case under statutes like the Religious Freedom Restoration Act much more easily. Second, this Article makes the novel claim that clearer understanding of the coercive control government exercises over sacred sites should animate a strong obligation under the government’s trust responsibility and plenary power doctrine to provide more — rather than less — robust protection of Indigenous sacred sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently there has been a surge of renewed interest in the psychedelic compound psilocybin. In particular, psilocybin is being studied in clinical settings as a potential breakthrough treatment for depression. Alongside this growing therapeutic interest, there has been a rise in the religious use of psilocybin, as evidenced by the creation of a number of psilocybin mushroom churches in the United States. While the dominant popular discourse surrounding psilocybin is currently clinical, psilocybin churches offer an alternative form of meaning making regarding the psychedelic experience. Specifically, this article argues that psilocybin churches enable their followers to participate in a dynamic social process of “sacred sensemaking,” whereby psilocybin mushrooms are considered to be a sacrament, church members follow a ritual-based psychopharmacological practice, and the psychedelic experience is interpreted in terms of a direct encounter with the divine. Different psilocybin churches have unique approaches, ritual practices and cosmologies, nonetheless this article suggests that they may be united by this common process of sacred sensemaking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For immigrants in America, places of worship convey a desire for symbolic permanence and financial stability, while less formal transitional sacred spaces reveal an understated and ephemeral relationship with the new land. As the most diverse city in the United States, Houston's multicultural urban landscape is inherently hybridized. Immigration and urban settlement patterns have resulted in a continual shifting and blurring of social customs, cultural influences, and architectural identities. Reflecting on the Vietnamese diaspora in America, this essay examines the impact of Vietnamese influences on "everyday" sacred architectures. It surveys a range of modest adaptations and ground-up interventions that have re-shaped the contemporary built environment of Houston. Using the city as a laboratory, this essay samples various architectural strategies employed by the Vietnamese in the construction, adaptation, and appropriation of Buddhist and Roman Catholic places of worship. It considers the identity of these heterotopian spaces of otherness as they transform and merge with the broader sacred landscape of the United States. Far more than merely religious spaces, these structures and their sites support social, cultural, political, and philanthropic activities--acting as architectural "stage sets" connecting memory with the larger community across space, time, and culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the politics of space in the study of American religion. Part 1 argues that an attention to broken space, namely an assumed division between the sacred and the profane as well as between the local and the global, limits the kind of political relationships that the scholar can posit between religion and space. Part 2 proposes the term “affective space” as a flexible analytical tool with broad utility for the study of American religion, one that prompts scholars to address those social processes that constitute felt difference amid an unevenly interrelated world. To animate the production of affective spaces, this article draws on more than a decade of ethnographic research in and on postwar Guatemala. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

I begin with the premise that there is an American Islam being created—a version of the faith that aligns with the contemporary United States both organizationally and culturally. This faith formation is connected to the immigration of Muslims to the United States since the 1965 changes in immigration laws, even though Muslims have been in the United States, especially among African Americans, much longer than that. Two sets of social forces are creating this American Islam: the lived religious practices of the second and third generations of these post-1965 families; and the imposed images of Islam and institutional constraints of civil society coming from major social institutions and native-born Americans. The interaction of these “bottom up” and “top down” dynamics can be illuminated by an understanding of “place” in both social and geographical terms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article provides two 'readings' of the Vedanta temple of San Francisco to understand the complex process of world making by Hindu religious preachers in the USA during the first decade of the twentieth century. On the one hand is the visible world of shared meanings and practices and on the other hand is the haptic domain navigated by individuals in embodied ways. These two ways of knowing the building are intertwined; they play against each other, and yet they serve different purposes. The first reading explains the material configuration of place and the relationship between the various spaces and their uses. The second reading examines the spatial choreography and human experience of using this building. The example of the Vedanta temple shows us that a building is not a neutral container where inhabitants play out their lives as they wish. Instead, buildings are actively engaged in the way that events, experiences and memory are shaped. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Living memorials are landscaped spaces created by people to memorialize individuals, places, and events. Hundreds of stewardship groups across the United States of America created living memorials in response to the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. This study sought to understand how stewards value, use, and talk about their living, community-based memorials. Stewards were asked to describe the intention, use, and meanings of the memorials. Qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis were used to analyze 117 semi-structured interviews. Sacredness of space varied by a memorial's site type and uses. This and other findings supported the notion of sacred space as contested space. Sacred space can be produced from acts of "setting aside" that ascribe meaning to a memorial site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

: Writing from the perspective of a bicoastal Puerto Rican evangélica (Latina/o popular Protestantism), the author argues that the contemporary ‘problem of immigration’ is really an expression of global dislocation that has led to migratory patterns of ‘homelessness’. While there may be myriad causes of global dislocation, she suggests that insofar as the Latina/o community is concerned, a principal cause is the exportation, and therefore immigration, of U.S. expansionist policies (i.e., ‘corporate immigration’) into Latin America and the Caribbean. The church needs to re-vision “im/migrants” (the global homeless), itself, and God to respond adequately to the globally displaced. The article provides a brief synopsis of how past and present ‘corporate immigration’ has caused global dislocation for Puerto Ricans and Mexicans. Biblical understandings of stranger, as expressed through such terms as gēr and nōkrî, provide scriptural and theological bases that allow the author to envision creation, and therefore salvation, as the living out of a ‘sacred space’. The author then concludes with the affirmation that the church, as the incarnated witness of that space, is called to treat all migratory dislocated people as ‘kin’ and thus it is called to provide a ‘sacred space’ wherein the globally homeless can find safe haven—a home—amid their familia (kin). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses and examines opportunities and obstacles relating to the protection of American Indian sacred sites in the U.S. American Indian sacred site advocacy and efforts to guide U.S. government decisions toward respect of land-based religious practice are explored. A review of U.S. federal laws and court decisions relating to sacred sites is provided to examine conflicts regarding the development of the Mount Graham International Observatory (MGIO) located on top of the Dził Nchaa Si An, also known as the Pinaleño Mountains, in southeastern Arizona. The MGIO's significance to the Western Apache Nation is discussed.

Secularists tend not to destroy religious icons, but to displace them. This, too, is a form of iconoclasm. By excluding certain symbols from public places, they treat them as idols—threats to the freedom of rational, rights-bearing citizens and thus to the sacred spaces of the democratic nation-state. In so doing, they inscribe these supposedly neutral spaces with specific cultural and religious norms. Yet contrary to increasingly popular arguments on both the right and left, these norms vary greatly from place to place, audience to audience, actor to actor. This variety makes it difficult if not impossible to speak of a coherent secular spatiality, let alone a coherent secular subject. In the USA, iconoclastic performances produce secular places in great variety, some hostile to religion, others to religious nationalism, and others to the state. Focusing on legal conflicts over state-sponsored religious speech, this article aims to problematize the notion of 'secular normativity' by analyzing some of this geographical diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper details the experiences of 12 American college students as they travel through India, Thailand and Taiwan studying Buddhism for a semester. The paper discusses their joys and frustrations as they search for spirituality and meaning in a bus marked “Tourist”. The students share their feelings about being tourists, contrasting their desires to have an academic and spiritual experience as they visit sacred sites working with local scholars and religious practitioners. They struggle with their privledge and express their shame at seeing the economic inconsistencies and disparities of locals. As the semester ends, the students become increasingly self-reflective, embodying humility and compassion. They are transformed as they see the contradictions of religion and culture. Implications for tourism management are offered, as well as an examination of the cross-cultural issues of being a Westerner on a guided spiritual quest in an Eastern setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores al-Qa'ida's concept of a sacred geography, focusing on the idea of "ribat" -- maintaining watch on the frontier to defend Islam. Beginning in Afghanistan, fundamentalists have re-adopted this term from the hadith to characterize their struggle with the West, from al-Andalus to Palestine to Chechnya to Iraq. The implications for US policy are enormous, especially as it operates within the perceived Islamic patrimony. An understanding of ribat also helps explain why al-Qa'ida had no significant presence in Iraq prior to March 2003 but would soon thereafter [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the author's views on the dynamics of the Guadalupanaslos that produce the transnational religious space and mobility in the suburbs of Chicago. It tells that the sacred gathering were attended by Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, and Honduran religious fanatics of the Blessed Virgin of Guadalupe. It adds that excessive writings that interpret, substantiate, and criticize the religious impact in the U.S. indicated the Guadalupan devotees' identity formation outside of Mexico. It also adds that the Mexicans display their religious convictions with the intercultural and multinational dynamics which sustained the devotees' religious practices along migration circuits, who appeal and express explicitly their collective pro-immigrant subjectivities.

Focuses on the integral part played by place in the study of religion. Issues concerning the concept of place; Significance of sacred spaces in human religious and spiritual systems; Impact of urban locations on the development of religious life in the U.S.

ABSTRACT. This article examines the geographical ideology of al-Qa'ida. The central questions are to what extent al-Qa'ida terrorism is motivated by a desire to control geographical space, and how the organization defines that space as place in its communiqués. The study also asks whether al-Qa'ida's geographical rhetoric reveals the nature or locations of future attacks. Principal sources are statements and interviews by and with al-Qa'ida leaders, al-Qa'ida classifies distinctive geographical realms of legitimization, preparation, and action. Its geographical concerns and ambitions are hierarchical and based principally on perceptions of sacred space. The holy places of Mecca, Medina, and Jerusalem are the cornerstones of a greater Islamic holy land that al-Qa'ida seeks to rid of non-Islamic--especially U.S. and "Zionist"--elements and replace with a new caliphate. Terrorism directed principally against American civilians in the United States is one of the main tactics by which al-Qa'ida says it hopes to achieve its goals in geographical space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the legal and linguistic frameworks deployed to protect Native American sacred places. He maintains that U.S. federal policies are written in a language that does symbolic violence to the environments it purports to protect. He highlights the inclusion of sacred places on the National Register of Historic Places that represents the recognition of Native American cultural heritage. He argues for the need to rethink categories and develop a language that is sensitive, flexible and culturally specific.

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Explores the sacred geography of the Navajo land in the U.S. Potent significance of geographical omissions in pilgrimage and sacred-land studies; Identification of Gobernador Knob as on e of the central Navajo sacred mountains; Popularity of Gobernador Knob.

Strictly speaking any enclosed space or building can qualify as a mosque (masjid) if it satisfies the requirement of cleanliness, but although Muslims can pray almost anywhere, they have often set up mosques as a nucleus for community life, fulfilling social as well as cultural and aesthetic needs. The masjid is both a space and an institution through which Muslims make statements about themselves and about their faith. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Describes the exploration of the Casa Grande sacred site in Arizona in the 19th century. Explorers who visited the ruins; Why the Casa Grande was abandoned; Debate over the origin of the site.

Religious landscapes tell much more about a place than just religious adherence. The oftentimes strong correlation between ethnicity and religion means that a religious landscape can also be an ethnic landscape. In urban centers like Chicago, ethnic neighborhoods have long been identified by their central places of worship. The ethnic composition of neighborhoods, however, is not static. As one group moves up and out, another moves in. As a result, places of worship built to accommodate the original ethnic/religious group become places of worship for new residents. In the transition, new and growing groups may choose to share sacred space with the older and declining group. Through spatial succession of sacred space, sharing of sacred space, and converting profane space into sacred space, the ethnic groups of Chicago have created a fascinating and ever-changing religious landscape that tells much about the many different groups who live and worship in the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most research on the relationship between religion and environmentalism has been concerned with the effects of formal religious participation on individual ecological attitudes. This case study examines another fascinating aspect of the religion-ecology connection by revealing the implicitly religious character of grassroots environmentalism. Drawing on insights from Mircea Eliade's theory of sacred space, we call attention to a series of striking similarities between classical modes of religious experience on the one hand, and the sacralization of a prized natural resource located in Austin, Texas on the other. Using interview data collected from forty-five environmentalists and ecologically-minded individuals in Austin, we argue that this city's most prominent natural resource (Barton Springs) is construed by these individuals in terms that can be interpreted as (1) nodal space that provides individuals with access to ultimate reality, (2) integrative space which binds them to the local Austin community, and (3) demarcative space that furnishes Austin with a distinctive character in opposition to surrounding locales. We conclude by offering suggestions for future research and by delineating the implications of our findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author discusses the controversy over the announcement of the planned Muslim American community center in New York City to explore the increasingly contested meanings that sacred space has in the U.S. Also discussed is the desecration of a sacred space that the U.S. Air Force academy set aside for Wiccans and Druids near Colorado Springs, Colorado, and the broader issue of religious intolerance in the U.S. These moments illustrate the contested definitions of sacred space itself.

The article discusses protests held in Hawaii that stopped work on the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT), which if completed would be one of the largest optical telescopes in the world. Topics discussed include the activists' claim that Hawaii is sovereign and being occupied by the U.S., the role of the Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA), and the activists' contention that the site of the TMT, on the dormant volcano of Mauna Kea, is a sacred site.