Southern Cultures: the Sanctuary Issue

The Sanctuary Issue reveals practices and places of sanctuary understood in its broadest form—as sanctified, sacred, and holy, and also as safety, refuge, haven, and relief. This issue honors survival and joy and imagines horizons toward which to reach. It asks how sanctuary is related to belonging and to unbelonging, and how each is constructed. How have we nurtured sanctuaries—religious, secular, and those that exceed that binary? The issue looks to the long history and future of southern peoples, and people who traverse southern US geographies, who continue to envision and construct sanctuary in permanence and impermanence.