Paper Abstract
Tara Woodward has called many places "home"—the golden grassland of Nebraska, sunflower fields of Moldova, cornfields of Iowa, rust-red dirt of South Africa, but most recently the garden at Princeton Seminary's "Farminary" in New Jersey. Each home has shaped her love and academic interests in place, pedagogy, and agrarian readings of sacred texts. Tara is currently a senior MDiv/MACEF student at Princeton Theological Seminary, with a Master of Arts from Western Theological Seminary (MI).
This panel discussion, inspired by our exchange as doctoral fellows at Notre Dame's Institute for Advanced Study, convenes our historical, theological, and philosophical training concerning (1) the definition of placemaking, (2) its relationship to creation and re-creation, and (3) the role of practice in placemaking.
Individual presentations focus on a particular places, as below. We will respond to one another with questions and insights before opening to a wider conversation.
Melissa Coles. In 1810, Bernardo Abeyta, a Spanish colonist and Penitente leader living in lands currently known as New Mexico, discovered a crucifix in an earthen hole. The crucifix's miraculous appearance inspired Abeyta and other settlers to build a chapel over that hole, and devotees began reporting that its dirt healed people. I argue that these Spanish colonists drew upon Tewa-speaking Peoples' and Spanish peoples' cosmologies and practices to re-create and to claim a new place.
Kristi Haas. In Querida Amazonia (2020), Pope Francis echoes indigenous poetry to make "audible" the Amazon region's given particularity and damaged integrity as a place. Citing the framework of Louis Bouyer, I describe the significance of Francis's approach, conceiving poetic placemaking as a mirror of divine creative activity. This unprecedented sourcing of indigenous voices radically interprets and extends the biblical image of the voice of creation, a theme neglected in ecological theology.
Ross Jensen. For human persons, in their roles as stewards of creation, proper placemaking is simply homemaking (i.e., ╬┐ß╝░╬║╬┐╬¢╬┐╬╝╬»╬▒). Homemaking requires responsiveness to the given, ordered goodness of created places in their sacramental participation in the divine ╬╗¤î╬│╬┐¤é. Inhabited places, in their ecological integrity, properly inform the practices of their inhabitants and therein order their lives toward their common good. Such practices nonetheless stand in dialectic relations with such places, informing, per accidens, the places themselves.
