Angela Varga: Lane's Approaches

On page 58 of Lane’s text he writes that “the place, the story, and the moral demands of communal life all become interchangeable realities, each one able to signify the other. Claims of place, culture, and sacredness are thoroughly interconnected”. I think this quote best demonstrates Lane’s idea that each of the approaches are necessary to understand sacred place. You can’t study sacred place through only one of the approaches, but all of them together. The three approaches are ontological, cultural and phenomenological. The ontological approach is how the sacred place exists within the world, the cultural approach is the way humans construct sacred place, and the phenomenological approach is studying the interaction between humans and place. It is important to study sacred place through a combination of all these approaches in order to fully understand sacred place.