Sacred Places in a Burning World

Sacred places today are at grave risk from climate change as the waters rise around these sites and fires approach and engulf them. Even the briefest online search results in a long list of examples. Summers of record heat in northern Spain imperil pilgrims to Santiago de Compostela. Rising sea levels in the Florida Panhandle threaten hundreds of ancient Indigenous sacred sites. Flooding across East Asia has displaced Buddhist monks from their monasteries. Extreme heat in Mecca led to stampedes in 1990 and again in 2015, killing hundreds of pilgrims. In 2017, Hurricane Harvey inundated the sanctuary of the oldest synagogue in Houston, Texas, Congregation Beth Israel. Shrines and other sacred spaces caught in the path of extreme climate events and their aftermaths constitute a distinctive field of lived religious experience and practice in the post-Anthropocene, another name for our cataclysmic post-secular globalized world.