Reimagine "Place" and Reconnect with the Space Around You
It's possible for American Christians to live everywhere and nowhere at the same time. We're often disconnected from the places we inhabit--cut off from nature, our neighbors, people different from us, and a sense of rootedness. It's time to imagine a better way.
Each of us is placed by God in a specific "somewhere." Drawing on social science research and their experiences across American landscapes and the Middle East, Ben Norquist and Brian Miller show how Christians in the US can develop a redemptive imagination for place. Many people have uncritically accepted American cultural assumptions about land, property, home ownership, and the good life. Yet our identity as followers of Jesus should transform how we live in the physical world, even as we recognize how places shape their inhabitants.
This book explores
- tools for deeply understanding or "reading" places,
- perspectives from Scripture and theology on land and place,
- connections between colonialism, race, social class, and American landscapes,
- and more.
Norquist and Miller offer a variety of personal and corporate practices--including land research, reassessing priorities and habits, advocating for others, and reconsidering the nature of sacred space--to help each of us connect in a healthy way with our own "somewhere." They prompt us toward a broader vision for how God works through space, using biblical lenses of landscape as gift, sacrament, kin, and home.
Are you longing for a rooted, meaningful faith that responds to the needs of your community? Do you crave guidance towards engaging deeply with the place where God has set you? Every Somewhere Sacred is your hopeful invitation to receive the world with gratitude and steward it well for the next generations. Get your copy today!
