Focusing on different kinds of things that matter for religion, including sacred artefacts, images, bodily fluids, sites, and electronic media, it offers a wide-ranging set of multidisciplinary studies
Dick Houtman is Full Professor of Sociology of Culture and Religion at the Center for Sociological Research (CeSO), University of Leuven, Belgium. His principal research interests are the spiritualization of religion and the culturalization of politics in the contemporary Western world. His two most recent books are Religions of Modernity: Relocating the Sacred to the Self and the Digital (edited with Stef Aupers) and Farewell to the Leftist Working Class (with Peter Achterberg and Anton Derks). He is a member of the editorial boards of Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, Politics and Religion, Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion, and Sociologie. Birgit Meyer is professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University, The Netherlands. She has conducted research on missions and local appropriations of Christianity, Pentecostalism, popular culture, and video-films in Ghana. Her publications include Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity Among the Ewe in Ghana; Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure (edited with Peter Geschiere); Magic and Modernity: Interfaces of Revelation and Concealment (edited with Peter Pels); Religion, Media, and the Public Sphere (edited with Annelies Moors); and Aesthetic Formations: Media, Religion, and the Senses. She is vicechair of the International African Institute (London), a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Arts and Sciences, and one of the editors of Material Religion.
"Things gathers up a series of lively and provocative essays. Challenging received understandings of religion as primarily about beliefs (in spiritual beings) as historically derived and impossible to sustain, it draws attention to the centrality of the material in religious practices and debates about the world. This volume deserves a place on the shelf of anyone interested in either religion or materiality-or both." -- -Margaret Weiner University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill "Things is an essential archive for the study of religious materiality and the material study of religion." -- -David Chidester author of Wild Religion: Tracking the Sacred in South Africa "A highly spirited and robust materialization of a significant trend in the study of religion. The articles in this remarkably coherent collection speak back to iconoclasm and the ideal or ideology of immateriality as found explicitly in certain practitioners of religion and implicitly in its scholarship. They illustrate the various ways in which material objects function as signs, powers, and mediations, and examine as well the intellectual debates and theological disputations about their functions and effects to which things inevitably give rise." -- -Michael Lambek author of The Weight of the Past "... this volume is an invaluable contribution to religious and material culture studies, broadening the scope of both fields by introducing new questions in old contexts, and investing agency in people and spirit in things." -- -Gabrielle A. Berlinger -Museum Anthropology Review
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