Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory, and Identity
by Philip Sheldrake
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Book Summary Information
Author: Philip SheldrakeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-12-04
ISBN: 0801868610
Number of pages: 214
Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Book Reviews of Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory, and Identity
Book Review: Catholicity of Place
Summary: 5 Stars
Sheldrake roots his theology the sacramental catholicity of space where the particular points toward the universal. Sheldrake says that sacramentality is not the "eccentric intrusion of grace, or godly space into what is otherwise a profane world." Rather we live in a "sacramental universe or graced nature" which suggests "God's free self disclosure and self-giving" and "demands a human response." He suggests that God is the only truly catholic place and yet the incarnation anchors human experience of the sacred in the radically particular. The beyondness of God becomes known in the particular, transcending particularity through an intimate "presence as action" within all things. Sheldrake draws heavily upon social theorist Michel de Certeau when he suggests that we "practice place." Coupling the ideas that places are never complete and always growing in meaning with the idea that catholicity is about "expectancy, continuous transformation and about a process of becoming" the world begins to vibrate with revelatory potential in any and all places but never contained fully in any one.
One of the most powerful contributions that Sheldrake offers readers is Eucharistic places. Sacramentalism must mean more than a simply "graced world;" a fully sacramental approach to place is necessarily an ethical approach. The Eucharist is an "enactment of the special (and ethical) identity of the Christian community" which is to re-enacted in the rest of the world through further reconciliation and solidarity. And since places are always changing, we strive for a universal reconciliation and redemption of the broken world. This Eucharistic practice shapes the body of Christ in particular ways, and the space in which the body occupies offers a profound freedom to each member against homogenization of place and people. These places of reconciliation the body of Christ fills become places of hope amidst despair. The places become places of profoundly contradictory and ambiguous memory: where despair and horror are reconfigured, but not suppressed, into the narrative of Christ.
I highly recommend Sheldrake's proposal and potentials for those wanting to consider a sacramental vision of place.
Summary of Spaces for the Sacred: Place, Memory, and Identity
In Spaces for the Sacred, Philip Sheldrake brilliantly reveals the connection between our rootedness in the places we inhabit and the construction of our personal and religious identities. Based on the prestigious Hulsean Lectures he delivered at the University of Cambridge, Sheldrake's book examines the sacred narratives which derive from both overtly religious sites such as cathedrals, and secular ones, like the Millennium Dome, and it suggests how Christian theological and spiritual traditions may contribute creatively to current debates about place.
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