Religion and geography
Religion and geography is the study of the impact of geography, i.e. place and space, on religious belief.
Another aspect of the relationship between religion and geography is religious geography, in which geographical ideas are influenced by religion, such as early map-making, and the biblical geography that developed in the 16th century to identify places from the Bible.
Research traditions
Traditionally, the relationship between geography and religion can clearly be seen by the influences of religion in shaping cosmological understandings of the world. From the sixteenth and seventeenth century, the study of geography and religion mainly focused on mapping the spread of Christianity (termed ecclesiastical geography by Issac 1965), though in the later half of the seventeenth century, the influences and spread of other religions were also taken into account.
Other traditional approaches to the study of the relationship between geography and religion involved the theological explorations of the workings of Nature – a highly environmentally deterministic approach which identified the role of geographical environments in determining the nature and evolution of different religious traditions.