Includes bibliographical references and index.

Does God wear clothes? -- The fashion system -- Seeking sacred places -- The shopping mall as "stairway to heaven," leading nowhere -- Worshiping the golden mouse : Walt Disney world and American civil religion -- Private possessions : American domestic religion and the suburban -- God naked : the violence of banality and the crisis of affordable housing -- Living waters -- Light of the world -- The rock of salvation -- The true vine -- One body -- Cities of God -- Epilogue : Pilgrims' process : salvation by grace through place.

Christian historian Sidney Mead has observed: "In America space has played the part that time has played in older cultures of the world." In Shopping Malls and Other Sacred Spaces, Jon Pahl examines this provocative statement in conversation with what he calls the "spatial character" of American theology. He argues that places are always imaginatively constructed by the human beings who inhabit them. Sometimes this spatial theology works to our benefit; other times it poses spiritual risks. What happens when our banal "clothing of the sacred" violates our genuine need for comfort and intimacy? Or when we remember that the fleeting pleasures of a shopping trip or a Disneyland escape are designed to fill someone else's pocket rather than the spiritual emptiness in our own hearts? Pahl develops several ways to "clothe the divine from within the Christian tradition." He introduces a theology of place that reveals aspects of God's character through biblical metaphors drawn from physical spaces, such as the true vine, the rock, and the living water. Accessible and thought provoking, this enlightening book provides a better grasp of our particularly American way of lending religious significance to spaces of all kinds.