Every Somewhere Sacred: Rescuing a Theology of Place

Our identity as followers of Jesus can and should transform how we live in the physical world. We need a far more expansive Christian imagination for land and place. Common American narratives that reduce land to commodity, or irrelevant background miss the consistent emphasis in the biblical story that God created and cares for land and place. We should grapple with complicated American histories of land and Indigenous people, race and social class, and reapproach Biblical themes of land as home, gift, sacrament, and kin to help prompt Christian groups and individuals to work toward a Christian vision of land mattering in the past, present, and future.  We can recover Christian practices for living faithfully as members of our human geographies. And perhaps most importantly, we can receive the world itself as the gift it was intended to be.

My dissertation (PhD – Azusa Pacific University) explores how people learn and grow and how educational sectors become ideological battlegrounds, using a regional study of Palestinian colleges and universities in the occupied West Bank.

Director of the Network of Evangelicals for the Middle East and author of upcoming book Every Somewhere Sacred: Rescuing a Theology of Place in the American Imagination.