ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on spaces irrespective of whether or not they appear to be religious or sacred and examines the location of religion within them by attending to the presence of the 'religious' and the 'secular' and the tensions in and between them. The theme of sacred space, which arose from the conceptualisation of the 'sacred' in the early twentieth century and was fostered within anthropological and phenomenological traditions of scholarship on society and religion. Judy Tobler suggests that, at a scholarly level, both phenomenologists of place and phenomenologists of religion have fallen prey to processes of idealisation and essentialisation in their accounts of home and place as sacred. In order to establish the legacy for a spatial analysis of religion, those produced not only within religious studies but also within the disciplines of geography, sociology, and anthropology. The chapter have surveyed four areas space and the sacred, geography of religion, globalisation and locality.
