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Sacred sites offer believers the possibility of communing with the divine and achieving deeper insight into their faith. Yet their spiritual and cultural importance can lead to competition as religious groups seek to exclude rivals from practicing potentially sacrilegious rituals in the hallowed space and wish to assert their own claims. Holy places thus create the potential for military, theological, or political clashes, not only between competing religious groups but also between religious groups and secular actors. In War on Sacred Grounds, Ron E. Hassner investigates the causes and properties of conflicts over sites that are both venerated and contested; he also proposes potential means for managing these disputes. Hassner illustrates a complex and poorly understood political dilemma with accounts of the failures to reach settlement at Temple Mount/Haram el-Sharif, leading to the clashes of 2000, and the competing claims of Hindus and Muslims at Ayodhya, which resulted in the destruction of the mosque there in 1992. He also addresses more successful compromises in Jerusalem in 1967 and Mecca in 1979. Sacred sites, he contends, are particularly prone to conflict because they provide valuable resources for both religious and political actors yet cannot be divided. The management of conflicts over sacred sites requires cooperation, Hassner suggests, between political leaders interested in promoting conflict resolution and religious leaders who can shape the meaning and value that sacred places hold for believers. Because a reconfiguration of sacred space requires a confluence of political will, religious authority, and a window of opportunity, it is relatively rare. Drawing on the study of religion and the study of politics in equal measure, Hassner's account offers insight into the often-violent dynamics that come into play at the places where religion and politics collide. Sacred sites offer believers the possibility of communing with the divine and achieving deeper insight into their faith. Yet their spiritual and cultural importance can lead to competition as religious groups seek to exclude rivals from practicing potentially sacrilegious rituals in the hallowed space and wish to assert their own claims. Holy places thus create the potential for military, theological, or political clashes, not only between competing religious groups but also between religious groups and secular actors. In War on Sacred Grounds , Ron E. Hassner investigates the causes and properties of conflicts over sites that are both venerated and contested; he also proposes potential means for managing these disputes. Hassner illustrates a complex and poorly understood political dilemma with accounts of the failures to reach settlement at Temple Mount/Haram el-Sharif, leading to the clashes of 2000, and the competing claims of Hindus and Muslims at Ayodhya, which resulted in the destruction of the mosque there in 1992. He also addresses more successful compromises in Jerusalem in 1967 and Mecca in 1979. Sacred sites, he contends, are particularly prone to conflict because they provide valuable resources for both religious and political actors yet cannot be divided. The management of conflicts over sacred sites requires cooperation, Hassner suggests, between political leaders interested in promoting conflict resolution and religious leaders who can shape the meaning and value that sacred places hold for believers. Because a reconfiguration of sacred space requires a confluence of political will, religious authority, and a window of opportunity, it is relatively rare. Drawing on the study of religion and the study of politics in equal measure, Hassner's account offers insight into the often-violent dynamics that come into play at the places where religion and politics collide.

p strongAn exploration of the production and reception of nature and spirituality in America's national park system/strong America's national parks are some of the most powerful, beautiful, and inspiring spots on the earth. They are often considered \"spiritual\" places in which one can connect to oneself and to nature. But it takes a lot of work to make nature appear natural. To maintain the apparently pristine landscapes of our parks, the National Park Service must engage in traffic management, landscape design, crowd-diffusing techniques, viewpoint construction, behavioral management, and more-and to preserve the \"spiritual\" experience of the park, they have to keep this labor invisible. emSpirituality and the State/em analyzes the way that the state manages spirituality in the parks through subtle, sophisticated, unspoken, and powerful techniques. Following the demands of a secular ethos, park officials have developed strategies that slide under the church/state barrier to facilitate deep connections between visitors and the space, connections that visitors often express as spiritual. Through indirect communication, the design of trails, roads, and vista points, and the management of land, bodies and sense perception, the state invests visitors in a certain way of experiencing reality that is perceived as natural, individual, and authentic. This construction of experience naturalizes the exercise of authority and the historical, social, and political interests that lie behind it. In this way a personal, individual, nature spirituality becomes a public religion of a particularly liberal stripe. Drawing on surveys and interviews with visitors and rangers as well as analyses of park spaces, emSpirituality and the State/em investigates the production and reception of nature and spirituality in America's national park system./p

National Parks - 'America's Best Idea' - were from the first seen as sacred sites embodying the God-given specialness of American people and American land, and from the first they were also marked as tourist attractions. The inherent tensions between these two realities ensured the parks would be stages where the country's conflicting values would be performed and contested. As pilgrimage sites embody the values and beliefs of those who are drawn to them, so Americans could travel to these sacred places to honor, experience, and be restored by the powers that had created the American land and the American enterprise. This book explores the importance of the discourse of nature in American culture, arguing that the attributes and symbolic power that had first been associated with the 'new world' and then the 'frontier' were embodied in the National Parks. Author Ross-Bryant focuses on National Parks as pilgrimage sites around which a discourse of nature developed and argues the centrality of religion in understanding the dynamics of both the language and the ritual manifestations related to National Parks. Beyond the specific contribution to a richer analysis of the National Parks and their role in understanding nature and religion in the U.S., this volume contributes to the emerging field of 'religion and the environment,' larger issues in the study of religion (e.g. cultural events and the spatial element in meaning-making), and the study of non-institutional religion.

The sacred groves of India represent a long-held tradition of community management of forests for cultural reasons. This study used social science research methods in the states of Meghalaya and Karnataka to determine local attitudes toward the sacred groves, elements of sacred grove management including restrictions on resource use, as well as ceremonies associated with sacred groves. Over a seven-month period, 156 interviews were conducted in 17 communities. Residents identified existing taboos on use of natural resources in the sacred groves, consequences of breaking the taboos, and the frequency and types of rituals associated with the sacred groves. Results show that numerous factors contribute to pressures on sacred groves, including cultural change and natural resource demands. In Meghalaya, the frequency of rituals conducted in association with the sacred groves is declining. In both Meghalaya and Karnataka, there is economic pressure to extract resources from sacred groves or to reduce the sacred grove size, particularly for coffee production in Kodagu in Karnataka. Support for traditional ceremonies, existing local community resource management, and comprehensive education programs associated with the sacred groves is recommended.

In recent decades, religious spaces have increasingly become subject to heritage processes, encompassing both their tangible dimension and the emerging concept of intangible cultural heritage. This article examines the legal strategies available for protecting the (in)tangible cultural heritage that minority religious communities can employ to safeguard their religious sites. Focusing on the case of African-derived religions in Brazil, this study argues that the recognition of their (in)tangible heritage serves as a strategic legal instrument for protecting their religious spaces, despite the conflicts that such recognition may provoke. This article contributes to the field of cultural heritage law, engaging with religious studies and exploring the complexities of legally safeguarding minority cultural practices.

This article addresses the making of heritage and the processes of sacralisation involved by investigating the heritage created after the rescue of the “Wild Boars”, a Thai youth football team, from a flooded cave in July 2018. The unfolding story of this “epic rescue operation” was followed with tremendous engagement, locally, nationally and worldwide, an example of what I capture as “high-density events”. Cave diver specialists and rescue equipment were flown in. Thousands of volunteers, mainly from Thailand but also from abroad, assisted. In Thailand, schools participated massively in nationwide Buddhist prayer sessions. Renowned holy monk Khruba Bunchum Yansangwaro directed his prayers to the boys and predicted they would be found alive. The massive involvement with the 18-days rescue operation generated a multiplicity of memes, photographs, books, documentaries, paintings, and statues. As religious and national heritage, this material lives on in various forms and exhibitions, including the cave, which was declared to become a “living museum” immediately upon the completion of the rescue. The analysis concerns three interrelated issues: First, I focus on the “instantaneous heritagization” of the event, asking: how to understand the processes that transform people, objects, and places into heritage overnight? Second, I bring in the role of emotions and moral imagination to shed light on the secular and religious sacralities produced and reproduced in the making of heritage. Third, I am interested in the impact of the heritage on the cave and its vicinity, bringing in issues of ownership and power over the event’s legacy.

Sacred natural sites, as probably the oldest form of habitat reserve for religious or cultural causes worldwide, are suggested to have an important role in conserving vegetation; however, there are insufficient data supporting the detailed implications of such sites for vegetation conservation. Thus, we evaluated the effectiveness of vegetation conservation on a Tibetan sacred mountain in Yajiang County, Sichuan, China, by investigating species richness and the structural attributes of higher vascular plant communities on and around the sacred mountain from April to June 2009. The results showed that the number of tree species on the sacred mountain was significantly higher than that in the surrounding area, but there were no notable differences in the numbers of shrub and grass species between the two sites. The sacred mountain harbored a greater number of small, short trees compared with the surrounding area, wherein the low-shrub and grass understory was relatively dense. We conclude that the sacred mountain has a positive impact on indigenous vegetation protection, but disparities in the management of the allowed uses of such sites could reduce their conservation effectiveness.

The voices of women and men who struggled to protect sacred sites in the Hindmarsh Island, Murray Mouth and Goolwa area. When they did, it became the subject of a series of court cases, legal decisions, media speculation and parliamentary conflict, ending in 2001 with a vindication of their words.

On December 28th, 2016, former President Obama protected nearly 1.5 million acres of sprawling canyon lands and ancient cultural sites in southeast Utah by designating the area as Bears Ears National Monument. Politically, Native American groups and environmentalists applauded the designation. However, it infuriated some locals and state politicians who, declaring government overreach and unnecessary restrictions to the land, demanded the monument to be rescinded. As a result, President Trump signed a proclamation reducing the size of the monument by 85 percent. Environmental groups and tribal governments have responded by filing a host of lawsuits against the Trump administration. Locally, the controversy has divided the community and riled longstanding cultural tensions. While this political debate unfolds in the national spotlight, this project seeks to transcend the rhetoric, following diverse characters living in San Juan County and their relationships with the land.