Materializing the Bible
  • Welcome
  • About
    • Project Director
    • Undergraduate Research Assistants
    • Guest Contributors
    • Acknowledgments
  • Map
  • Attractions
    • Re-Creations >
      • Holy Land replicas, Noah's Arks, and More
      • Catholic Grottoes & Shrines
      • Live Biblical Theatre
      • Wilderness Tabernacles
    • Biblical Gardens >
      • Protestant gardens
      • Catholic gardens
      • Jewish gardens
      • Public gardens
    • Creationist sites
    • Bible History Museums
    • Past and Possible Parks
    • All attractions (year founded)
  • Tours
    • Re-Creations >
      • Nazareth Village
      • Garden of Hope
      • Fields of the Wood
      • Desert Christ Park
      • Biblical History Center
      • The Sorrowful Mother Shrine
      • Ave Maria Grotto
      • Museum Park Orientalis
    • Biblical Gardens >
      • Canberra, Australia
    • Creationist Sites >
      • Cabazon Dinosaurs
      • Noah's Ark Zoo Farm
    • Bible history museums >
      • Wycliffe Discovery Center
      • Museum of Biblical Art
  • Archive
    • Attraction Maps
    • Brochures
    • Guidebooks
    • Postcards
    • News Stories
  • Scholarship
    • Discussion Questions
    • Bibliography
  • Book
PictureBiblical History Center (La Grange, GA).
Welcome to Materializing the Bible: a digital scholarship project that catalogues biblical tourism sites throughout the world. What unites the 500+ attractions collected here? While diverse, they all transform written words of scripture into experiential, choreographed environments. These sites raise fascinating questions about pilgrimage and tourism, lived religion, consumption, religious art and creativity, sensory experience, attachment to place, religion and politics, and our shared culture of entertainment.

Materializing the Bible is intended for multiple audiences. We hope educators and students at all levels will find the curation thought provoking and useful. We also hope the site will be fruitful for public audiences, advancing anthropological ways of understanding religion. And, to fellow travelers: use this site to locate a site near you or your next destination.

For updates, follow us on Twitter. For a project overview, read a 2018 article published in the journal Religion. Explore the global distribution of attractions with the Map. We divide the attractions into four sub-genres:
  • Re-Creations: biblical stories, scenes, and characters replicated in multiple media;
  • Gardens: botanical flora used to re-create biblical environments;
  • Creationist sites: promoting young earth creationism;
  • Bible History Museums: biblical manuscripts and/or archaeological artifacts and replicas organized as narrated exhibits.
Past and Possible Parks details attractions that have closed, a few that were never realized, and others in planning or production stages. Tours takes you to selected attractions for a virtual visit.* And, Scholarship includes a bibliography of published scholarship, discussion questions, and a project archive.

Primary Subject Areas:
  • Anthropology
  • Anthropology of Religion
  • Anthropology of Christianity
  • Aesthetics, the Senses, Embodiment
  • Pilgrimage and Tourism
  • Space and Place
  • Social life of scriptures

Materializing the Bible has been reviewed in American Anthropologist, Journal of Heritage Tourism, and Religion and Society: Advances in Research. The project has been featured by Religion and Its Publics (University of Virginia), MAVCOR (Yale University), The Immanent Frame, Iconic Books, Patheos, and ​SPACES. See an interview with the project founders by the Miami University College of Arts & Science.

*All photographs taken by James S. Bielo unless otherwise indicated.

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