“Exploring Other Worlds: Constructing, Locating, and Navigating Imagined Religious Space” — Stanford University, October 1-2, 2015
Exploring Other Worlds: Constructing, Locating, and Navigating Imagined Religious Space
Stanford University
October 1, 2015 – October 2, 2015
The focus of our conference is the theme of imagined religious space. Our interest is in contributing to a discussion of religious space that moves beyond physical “sacred space” and considers the spatial significance of that which is imagined, unseen, and inaccessible. We are particularly interested in exploring how spatial discourse is used as a map for navigating imagined and immaterial domains such as memory, other worlds, lost homelands, and unexplored regions, and how imagined religious geographies such as cosmology and the afterlife are made real through narrative and material representations. We are hoping to examine the greater question of what is “religious space” and how it can be usefully conceptualized in the study of religion.
