Editorial: Placing religion and spirituality in geography

As Foucault’s work demonstrates, a culture cannot understand itself without erst understanding its implicit connection and development within the constructs of religious belief and practice. Contemporary culture is born out of religious traditions and the conditions of our knowledge are therefore embedded in religious discourse. The so-called secular space is itself a hybrid of past religious traditions, and in order to understand contemporary culture Foucault recognised (and was fascinated by) the religious ineuences upon thought and practice. (Carrette 1999: 33) From the spatial distributions of religious populations, the impacts such groups have on landscapes (with a particular, and rather peculiar, focus on cemeteries), to explorations into religious ecology and the role of Christian theology on environmental practices, the ‘geography of religion’—typically understood as a sub-discipline of (cultural) geography—has a long and distinguished history (see Kong 1990). Nonetheless, in recent years geographers