Faith and Place An Essay in Embodied Religious Epistemology

This book takes knowledge of place as a basis for thinking about the place-relative character of religious practice, and the relationship between religious belief and our embodied life.Recent epistemology of religion has appealed to various secular analogues for religious belief - especially analogues drawn from everyday sensory perception and scientific theory construction. These approaches tend to overlook the close connection between religious belief and our moral, aestheticand otherwise evaluatively engaged relationship to the world. If we take knowledge of place as a starting point for religious epistemology, this book proposes, then we will be able to bring into clearer focus the embodied, action-orienting, perception-structuring, and affect-infused character ofreligious understanding.Mark R. Wynn explores how the religious significance of particular places is a function of their microcosmic significance (or their capacity to stand for some encompassing truth about the human condition), their ability to conserve historical meanings (where these meanings exercise an enduringethical claim upon those who are located at the place at later times), and their facilitation of a material or gestural identification of a sacred meaning through relevant embodied appropriation of the site.Wynn suggests that we can think of God as a kind of genius loci, where the relevant locus is the sum of material reality. On this view, knowledge of God is not just analogous to knowledge of place, but consists in part in an integrative or synoptic appreciation of the existential import of a rangeof particular places.