Landscapes of the Secular: Law, Religion, and American Sacred Space

摘要

Americans are wont to see landscape as sacred. Yet there are myriad competing concepts of the "sacred," and in a nation where an ideal of pluralism is inscribed into the rule of law, political conflict over sacred landscapes is practically inevitable. Nicolas Howe, in his recent book, Landscapes of the Secular: Law, Religion, and American Sacred Space, takes aim at disentangling the many ways the often little-examined concepts of the sacred incite disputes over landscapes' legal standing in America. The fact that there is also no straightforward means of seeing landscape in a secular way complicates matters all the more. Howe's argument is that the sacred-secular dialectic influences how Americans imagine and experience landscape far more than discrete concepts like "sacred" or "secular" influence Americans on their own. When taken up into legal discourse, this dialectic, Howe demonstrates, becomes a theater in which the secular-religious divide is continually being negotiated and reproduced.