ABSTRACT
Religion takes place in space. Religious people are distributed globally and locally in various patterns at different times and according to various factors such as mission and conversion, religious growth or decline, migration and population change, war and natural disaster. Religions – whether ‘indigenous’, ‘world’ or ‘new’ religions – are more or less closely identified with particular continents, countries or localities. Religious groups occupy social spaces, gathering in mosques, churches, temples, community centres and other buildings, and meeting at times in the open in places denoted or apprehended as sacred. Families and individuals practise their religions at home, sometimes setting apart a room or area for worship or meditation, chanting or dancing. Religious and cosmological beliefs often have a spatial character, such as ideas about where certain religious activities should occur or where objects should be placed, which lands or places are deemed to be holy, or how heavenly cities or spiritual landscapes appear and are spatially organised. Furthermore, the location of religion in secular spaces is important too. Is it confined to particular times and places by the secular state? Is this reflected in distinctions between public and private spheres, in planning regulations or in the ritual and discourse of state and civic life? Religions and religious groups change over time, and this affects their spatial arrangements. They change across space too: they may appear and be situated quite differently in the US, India and Indonesia, for example. As we can see, religions and places are mutually influential.
