Chris Estes Outside Reading #2

Chris Estes Outside Reading #2

The title of that article was Sacred Sites: Nature and Nation in the U.S. National Parks. The U.S. National Parks have played a role in the discourse of America. The parks are able to serve this role because of the close agreement between nature and nation in U.S. It serves as a sacred site and a big symbol in U.S. American culture. By approaching the parks as pilgrimage sites, we can look at the American values that have been in them. Central to both is the idea behind the parks: to preserve wilderness. The goal of the essay is two reasons: 1) as part of the comparative study of religions, to suggest the usefulness of a heterogeneous, specialized model for analyzing sacred places and to apply the model to the study of American culture in order to understand more about how the embodiment of nature and nation in the National Parks has worked as a unifying symbol while at the same time disclosing contested and conflicting values in American society, and 2) to show how the meanings surrounding this symbol are being transformed today.