Taking Religion Outside: New Secular Identities Between Autonomy, Contingency and Total Immersion

Abstract

The secular has proven to be a condition all too intertwined with Christianity and Western narratives. However, the truth is that the religious and the secular are not opposites but they are inextricably linked within the geographic. This research is inspired by geographia [geo-earth and grapho-write], writing about earth. Observations, speculations, interpretations were made and stories recorded to illuminate how explicit intersections between religion and the environment expands the identity of the sacred. A study was made of critical cultural concepts that project objects into geographic objects, geographies, or both. It acknowledges architecture transcending beyond the traditional. The goal of this paper is to chart key characteristics, not as epistemological provocations, but as manifestations of material, spatial, and aesthetic transcendence. These characteristics may indicate how modified forms of religion not only saturate the prevailing presence of the secular, but completely transform the sacred.