This book considers some of the ways in which particular places can acquire special religious significance, as sites for prayer or other kinds of devotional activity, and how knowledge of place provides a key to understanding the nature of religious knowledge. There are two main arguments in the book. The first proposes that there is a deep-seated analogy between knowledge of God and knowledge of place, and that knowledge of God consists partly in an integrative knowledge of the significance of particular places. This strand of the book contrasts with recent discussion in the epistemology of r ... More

This book considers some of the ways in which particular places can acquire special religious significance, as sites for prayer or other kinds of devotional activity, and how knowledge of place provides a key to understanding the nature of religious knowledge. There are two main arguments in the book. The first proposes that there is a deep-seated analogy between knowledge of God and knowledge of place, and that knowledge of God consists partly in an integrative knowledge of the significance of particular places. This strand of the book contrasts with recent discussion in the epistemology of religion, which has tended to privilege, for instance, scientific or ordinary perceptual kinds of knowledge as analogous to religious knowledge. Taking knowledge of place as a route into the question of the nature of religious knowledge provides a way of foregrounding the practical and engaged character of religious knowledge, and its connection to our moral and aesthetic commitments. The second central strand of the book uses these findings to consider some of the ways in which particular places can acquire special religious significance. By contrast with approaches which postulate a sharp distinction between ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ spaces, and by contrast with the idea that the differentiated religious significance of space reflects some merely psychological truth, the book proposes that the religious import of a place is a function of its microcosmic significance (its capacity to represent some larger truth about the condition of human beings), its ability to conserve historical meanings (where these meanings exercise an enduring ethical claim upon those who are present at the site at later times), and its facilitation of a kind of embodied reference to God (where a person's thought is anchored in God by virtue of what they do at the site).