Victor Counted

The Psychology of Religion and Place certainly deserves the subtitle "Emerging Perspectives" as this book assembles disparate studies that concern themselves with this interdisciplinary pursuit. A common theme across them is that there is a place for the intersection of Religious Studies and Environmental Psychology and that Attachment Theory can be extended to places and not just people. This is certainly the aim of any emerging disciplines within the academy, which are often under fire from the established hegemony.

The chapters thus vary quite a bit in scope ranging from memory studies, to anxiety and disaster relief, to dependency, among others. What is not varied are the religions studied throughout the book. There is a heavy Judeo-Christian emphasis to most of the chapters and Islam seems to just get a reflexive mention whenever pilgrimage is brought up. One chapter examines places in mythology which is the closest anything comes to expanding outside the Abrahamic worldview, although this chapter does not examine religious meaning and sticks to myth. While I commend the authors for not speaking outside of their respective knowledge bases I feel that Hinduism, Shinto, and the emergence of neo-pagan religions would offer plenty of ground when talking about sacred spaces, perhaps more so than Abrahamic ones.

Of interest to practicing magicians/occultists would be the second chapter by Rupert Sheldrake which posits ritual as a way of sharing in a "morphic resonance" across generations. For anyone involved in a specific tradition and concerned with the continuation of that tradition, this chapter offers plenty of arguments for the orthopraxy of shared ritual. Other chapters offer their own insight to those designing a communal temple space such as pride of place (PoP), disaster recovery (think post-COVID), resilience, and other meaningful arguments concerning what a space means in a sacred sense, and how humans psychologically process those spaces.

Overall this book is loaded with fruitful insights and a wide variety of topics. I hope to see more from this field, especially as it branches outside of the Abrahamic blinders. There are a few instances of typographical errors that should be fixed in future editions, but these don't distract too much from the worthwhile read for anyone working with a sense of place in their spiritual practice.… (mehr)