Raum und Geist

Religions are embedded in space and places, which reveal the spiritual power and the God who acts. The aesthetic composition of sacred space is inextricably linked with the ethical reshaping of the world as a lived space for created beings. Although space and places represent elementary phenomena of human life and orientation, theology and religious studies have only sparsely explored them. The book's seven chapters investigate the central theme in a double direction by tracing the space in the spirit and the spirit in space as well as the mobility of both. They emerge in the horizon of an ecotheological "aesth/ethics" of space, where the aesthetical is programmatically placed over the ethical. They invite to walks through landscapes where the strange and the same join together. Insights from such different disciplines as ecological and contextual theology, anthropology of religion, phenomenology and eco-aesthetics of nature, as well as urban planning and history of arts and ideas are interwoven with each other. The superior intention is to support the reader in his/her making-oneself-at-home in the strange and on earth our home, and to earth religion anew by tracing the Spirit in space and sacred and other places.>