Joseph Rivera: Landscapes of the Sacred 1

From chapter eight in Lane’s Landscapes of the Sacred he makes note of a Robert Orsi and a question he raised to his students about the nature of religious experience and the way we define places thought to be sacred. Their response was that they had an inclination is to insist that “religion is private and interior, not shamelessly public; mystical, not ritualistic; intellectually consistent and reasonable, not ambivalent and contradictory.” They want to identify religious experience as unlike anything else, divorcing it from the ordinary realities of everyday life. I believe this is a topic many people struggle with because who is to say that one idea is better than the other. Like believing that since a sacred place is open to the public makes it less sacred. I believe what determines what is sacred is up to the individual and what he or she considers sacred, and whether or not they find their sacred place depends on where their personal journey takes them.