Reflections on “Geography and Religions”
Publication Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
12-2024
Abstract
David E. Sopher’s (Prog Human Geogr 5(4):510–524, 1981) landmark essay marks a turning point in geographical scholarship on religion. Published as the cultural turn was gaining momentum in human geography, Sopher calls out the fact that much geographical work on religion had been hitherto preoccupied with the themes of denominational dynamics, spatial distributions of religion across space and landscape, and the role of sacred centers and pilgrimage routes in determining patterns of religious mobility. In his call for a broadening and deepening of geographical scholarship on religion, he paved the way for the emergence of the so-called “new” geographies of religion that emerged in the early 1990s. Notwithstanding, Sopher’s call for geographers to study the “neglected questions” of how religion intersects with ecology have been largely ignored until very recently, thus providing an indication of the prescience of a paper that was published more than four decades ago. This reflection contextualizes Sopher’s work, offering insight into the genesis of his ideas, the importance of the cultural turn in shaping his thinking, and an appreciation of how he paved the way for much of the contemporaneous geographical scholarship on religion.
Discipline
Geography | Religion
Research Areas
Integrative Research Areas
Publication
Handbook of the Geographies of Religion
Editor
KONG, Lily; WOODS, Orlando; TSE, Justin K. H.
First Page
185
Last Page
189
ISBN
9783031648106
Identifier
10.1007/978-3-031-64811-3_11
Publisher
Springer
City or Country
Dordrecht
Citation
WOODS, Orlando.
Reflections on “Geography and Religions”. (2024). Handbook of the Geographies of Religion. 185-189.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/cis_research/274
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-64811-3_11
