Browsing by Subject "Sacred"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
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    Greenwashed: Identity and Landscape at the California Missions
    (Achaeopress, 2015) Kryder-Reid, Elizabeth
    This paper explores the relationship of place and identity in the historical and contemporary contexts of the California mission landscapes, conceiving of identity as a category of both analysis and practice (Brubaker and Cooper 2000). The missions include twenty-one sites founded along the California coast and central valley in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The missions are all currently open to the public and regularly visited as heritage sites, while many also serve as active Catholic parish churches. This paper offers a reading of the mission landscapes over time and traces the materiality of identity narratives inscribed in them, particularly in ‘mission gardens’ planted during the late 19th and first half of the 20th century. These contested places are both celebrated as sites of California's origins and decried as spaces of oppression and even genocide for its indigenous peoples. Theorized as relational settings where identity is constituted through narrative and memory (Sommers 1994; Halbwachs 1992) and experienced as staged, performed heritage, the mission landscapes bind these contested identities into a coherent postcolonial experience of a shared past by creating a conceptual metaphor of ‘mission as garden’ that encompasses their disparities of emotional resonance and ideological meaning.
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    Koininia
    (2020) Strong, Sarah; Setser, Meredith
    To be alive is to be in relationship. To be human is to seek connection. Through our senses we connect to one another, to the world around us and to the spirit of life itself. Our human experience is an opportunity for sacred relationship. I have found this relationship through the experience and transformation of plant life. A plants life cycle exemplifies the life~death~rebirth process that is our human experience. With intention, I harvest and transform plant fibers, molding them into handmade paper forms. Papermaking is a true alchemical transformation of natural materials utilizing earth, air, fire, and water. Being enveloped in nature provides me an opportunity for powerful reflection, grounding, and inspiration. Communicating and collaborating with the earth I am reminded to breathe more slowly and deeply. I watch the leaves moving with the wind. I see the birds flocking, moving together in unison. I come upon a plethora of examples of the harmony and tension we navigate in our human lives. Koininia bears witness to the natural world as a gateway to sacred relationship.