**7. Conclusions**

How are Anthropocene relations bearing on religion, and how are religious processes shaping Anthropocene futures? This essay has shared hypotheses and collaborative research practices that have emerged from Sanctuary Lab in hopes of advancing discussion of methods for investigating that lead question. The six sections of the paper have generated six suggestions: (1) the cultural tensions produced by thresholds of sacred space may be intensified by new pressures on boundaries, which may show up in a ffective experience; (2) sanctuaries can be treated as laboratories for studying how particular cultural processes are interacting with global flows and planetary stresses; (3) ecosocial futures are forged as communities redeploy inherited ways of interpreting new threats and creating refuge from them; (4) insofar as sanctuaries generate forces of expulsion and political violence, planetary stresses interact with those dynamics as well, in uncertain and indeterminate directions; (5) nonhuman species, flows, lands, and forces participate in sacralization processes; (6) arts-based practices of attentiveness can introduce landscape participation into the mode of inquiry, while also driving critical reflection on mediations of experience.

The two key terms of our lead question faded in importance. Those perilous inventions of analysis, "religion" and "Anthropocene," can distort more than they illuminate about what is happening in particular places, relations, and communities. I have treated them as proxies for two knots of critical debate that, when brought together, may advance understanding of how cultural processes are interacting with global flows and planetary stresses in places designated as sanctuary from sovereign powers and exogenous dangers. I have tried to illustrate how "sanctuary" can organize research with potential to contribute toward transdisciplinary studies of coupled human and environmental change. A central challenge for environmental change research is integrating di fferent scales and tempos of change, finding ways to illuminate the frictions and feedbacks among them. The lab has not ye<sup>t</sup> created a fully transdisciplinary approach, I should be clear. A particular challenge remains how to better incorporate the sciences and develop research that helpfully informs environmental change science (Castree 2014; Palsson et al. 2013).

Finally, I note that feedback from researchers in Sanctuary Lab as well as from early public audiences suggests that interest in its experiment goes beyond advancing academic capacities of investigation. Participants and the public seem drawn to it as a way to search for resilience, looking to the unusual research practices for a signal of how to dwell amidst the frictions and temporalities of this discontinuity. Research outputs from the lab thus seek to engage publics and scholars in a variety of formats: in addition to conventional scholarly articles, we are creating podcasts, short documentary video, musical composition and performance, and creative nonfiction. We have discovered that—especially when they involve researchers collaborating across borders and disciplines—practices of attending, questioning, and sharing can themselves make a kind of refuge.

**Funding:** This research received no external funding. Sanctuary Lab was initiated with pilot funding from the University of Virginia.

**Acknowledgments:** While this essay cannot be taken to reflect the views of my collaborators, it is indebted to everyone in Sanctuary Lab, especially Martien Halvorson-Taylor and Kurtis Schae ffer. Encouragement to write from this project began in a Luce Foundation working group on the Anthropocene convened at Duke University by Jedediah Purdy and Norman Wirzba, and was further shaped by a conference on "Vulnerability in the Anthropocene," convened by Matthew Wickman and George Handley at Brigham Young University. I am grateful for the feedback from many colleagues in both settings, and to two anonymous reviewers from this journal.

**Conflicts of Interest:** Author declares no conflict of interest.
