Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces

Sidney Mead once observed that in America space has played the part that time plays in older cultures, and Jon Pahl takes that remark seriously. His argument is that places are always imaginatively made by the people who inhabit them, so a shopping mall or a Disneyland escape can carry a kind of theology of its own. Sometimes that works in our favour; sometimes it sells comfort and intimacy back to us, filling someone else's pocket rather than our own emptiness.

Pahl, a Christian historian of religion, then turns constructive, drawing on biblical metaphors rooted in physical places, such as the true vine, the rock and the living water, to suggest how the divine might be clothed from within the Christian tradition. It is an accessible, searching read for anyone curious about why Americans lend religious weight to the spaces they build and visit.