Abstract

This chapter focuses on the important role played by landscape in the Christian religious imagination. It argues for the ambiguity of “landscape” in the sense that locales like forests, fields, and mountains are both geographic realities and imaginary realities. Many locales are considered powerful symbols of fear or desire. According to Simon Schama’s Landscape and Memory, “Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock.” This means that landscape is irreducibly historical since it portrays the material world mediated through human experience. It is also inevitably linked with issues of power because it provides the physical features upon which human beings draw and shape unique identities and distinct worldviews.