Every Somewhere Sacred: Rescuing a Theology of Place in the American Imagination

Become Stewards of God's Vision Where You're Placed

It’s possible for American Christians to live everywhere and nowhere at the same time. We’re often disconnected from the places we inhabit—cut off from nature, our neighbors, people different from us, and a sense of rootedness. It’s time to imagine a better way.

Each of us is placed by God in a specific "somewhere." Drawing on social science research and their experiences across American landscapes and the Middle East, Ben Norquist and Brian Miller show how Christians in the US can develop a redemptive imagination for place. Many people have uncritically accepted American cultural assumptions about land, property, home ownership, and the good life. Yet our identity as followers of Jesus should transform how we live in the physical world, even as we recognize how places shape their inhabitants.

Every Somewhere Sacred explores

tools for deeply understanding or “reading” places;interdisciplinary scholarship from Scripture, sociology, and theology on land and place; andconnections between colonialism, race, social class, and American landscapes.

Norquist and Miller offer a variety of personal and corporate practices including land research, reassessing priorities and habits, advocating for others, and reconsidering the nature of sacred space, prompting us toward a broader vision for how God works through space, using biblical lenses of landscape as gift, sacrament, kin, and home.

Are you seeking a rooted, meaningful faith that responds to the needs of your community? If you want to dive deeper into a theology of place, Every Somewhere Sacred will help you connect to your own "somewhere" and offer guidance for becoming a steward of God's vision where you are.