S Brent Plate

Contributors from a variety of disciplines and institutions explore the work of museums from many perspectives, including cultural studies, religious studies, and visual and material culture. Most museums throughout the world – whether art, archaeology, anthropology or history museums – include religious objects, and an increasing number are beginning to address religion as a major category of human identity. With rising museum attendance and the increasingly complex role of religion in social and geopolitical realities, this work of stewardship and interpretation is urgent and important. Religion in Museums is divided into six sections: museum buildings, reception, objects, collecting and research, interpretation of objects and exhibitions, and the representation of religion in different types of museums. Topics covered include repatriation, conservation, architectural design, exhibition, heritage, missionary collections, curation, collections and display, and the visitor's experience. Case studies provide comprehensive coverage and range from museums devoted specifically to the diversity of religious traditions, such as the State Museum of the History of Religion in St Petersburg, to exhibitions centered on religion at secular museums, such as Hajj: Journey to the Heart of Islam, at the British Museum.

The introduction to a volume that collects 12 essays from contributors examining the place of religion in films from around the world. Following Fredric Jameson's nomination of cinema as a "geopolitical aesthetic," Plate's introduction adapts this to call cinema a "georeligious aesthetic."
Published by Palgrave, 2003.

Regardless of their semantic meaning, words exist in and through their material, mediated forms. By extension, sacred texts themselves are material forms and engaged in two primary ways: through the ears and eyes. This article focuses on the visible forms of words that can stir emotional and even sacred responses in the eyes of their beholders. Thus words can be said to function iconically, affecting a mutually engaging form of " religious seeing. " The way words appear to their readers will change the read-er's interaction, devotion, and interpretation. Examples range from modern popular typography to European Christian print culture to Islamic calligraphy. Weaving through the argument are two key dialectics: the relation of words and images, and the relation of the seen and the unseen.

S. Brent Plate's introductory essay orients the reader to the academic move toward material text studies, a wide range of research questions and pedagogical practices that includes attention to the history of the book, book technologies, the social habits of readership especially in relation to print culture, and issues raised in media studies about differences in verbal communication. This introduction is followed by a series of one-page Teaching Tactics that prompt students to ask about the material conditions in and through which scriptures acquire meaning. Students are challenged to become aware of the sensorial nature of sacred texts, and of communication itself. They touch, see, and hear in new ways, learning with their bodies.

Religion and art became separated in the modern age, or so the secularized story goes. But looking at a history of books, including their artistic creation, we find interesting ongoing parallels occurring between religious and artistic texts. Illustrations and scripts, bindings and papers, printmaking and performance, all serve artistic and religious ends. The artistic and the religious are tied together, ultimately, by appealing to the senses, bringing texts and reading into the realm of the aesthetic (Gk. aesthetikos: pertaining to sense perception). Books are powerful and enjoyable as well as dangerous and condemned, because they are felt, seen, tasted, heard, and touched. By looking at contemporary "book arts" and noting their sensual affects, we can understand "sacred texts" in better ways. Ultimately we find modern secular arts are not so far from religious experiences. Examples come from modern book artists such as John Latham, Brian Dettmer, Luigi Serafini, Meg Hitchcock, and Guy Laramée.

I argue that the use of ornament is utilized as a visual marking of identity, as the production of space becomes the production of identity. Meanwhile, changes in styles mirror new modes of identification, though through this reflexive process repressed elements of identity can also be revealed. Starting with an outline of the place of ornament within Islam, I note how Islamic ornamental styles developed specifically in Seville and greater Andalusia, and ultimately how they continued after Islam was no longer the dominant cultural-political-religious force, especially commenting here on the rise of the neo-Mudejar. Finally I chart three differing examples of the ongoing presence of Islamic-inspired ornamentation in modern European spaces, and how orientalism is bound to ornamentalism. Through a focus on ornament, we begin to see some interesting and at times odd connections between Christians and Muslims in the Medieval and Modern Iberian peninsula.

A brief account for the presence of religion in modern and contemporary art. Argues that we need to shift from analysis of "iconoclash" (Latour's term for power struggles over images) to "iconomash" (what happens when artists beg, borrow and steal across times and traditions).

Herein we offer a critique of contemporary filmic visions of apocalypse. The problem with many Hollywood-style apocalyptic films is that they expect the end of the world to be a spectacular end of the whole world. Against this, by reviewing two contemporary films (Strange Days ...

Joe Kickasola: IntroductionGood morning. My name is Joe Kickasola. I teach at Baylor University and I'm privileged to introduce this panel and share my perspective on it, which may be somewhat different from those that are here in the room. I come at this topic as a filmmaker and film theorist interested in religious faith and experience, not as a theologian interested in film. In my own field, very few people are interested in faith as a point of focus, despite its obvious importance in human life. I'm sure you all could articulate the reasons for this strange omission far better than I, but I puzzled over it most intensely as I was writing a book on the filmmaker Krzysztof Kieslowski. In that process, it became clear that to ignore the faith questions - and, more importantly, the dynamics of questioning and wrestling with faith - would be to completely miss the heart and soul of that filmmaker's work. The importance of the sacred, and the way it suffuses life and cinem...

family has all moved away from the area and I have no connections to any sort of childhood home, I've often told people that the desert is my 'spiritual home'. These are the words that trickle out of my mouth when someone mentions the desert, my own Pavlovian salivation to the thought of dry skies overhead, and brown sand below. Yet, my own proclamation puzzles me, first because I radically dislike the term 'spiritual', though that's another subject, but second, I wonder, what do I mean by a 'home'? Can one actually reside, or abide, in the desert? Or is it always, as Professor Jasper reminds us, a place for travellers, wanderers, and explorers. As he himself relates his experience of the South Texan desert, 'I don't think I could live here for very long.' Obviously, people do live in the desert. In fact, the fastest growing city in the United States over the past decade has been Las Vegas, projected to top two million inhabitants in the n...

For the first issue of our tenth year of publishing Material Religion, the editors wanted to use this opportunity to reflect on the first decade, and think ahead to the next one. We framed this as a conversation among the four of us who oversee the content of the journal. When the editors first met together and began to articulate the scope and aims for this new journal, we had to come up with a title and subtitle. At that time, the phrase “material religion” was not in common usage. One early response to the title was, “Material Religion? Isn’t that an oxymoron?” Of course, the answer is unfortunately “Yes” if one looks at the many studies that stress the intellectual contents, arguments, doctrines of religions. “Religion” is still defined by many people— scholars and believers—as a set of abstract beliefs. And so we conceived a subtitle that was intended to work toward an inclusive view of subject matter (i.e. “objects, art, and belief”), but also provoke some curiosity. Now, somewhat due to the success of the journal, the phrase “material religion” can be used without explanation or justification. And it is a phrase that we can honestly say is used around the world, as the geographical diversity of our authors and their subject matter attests. But we have continued to wonder about the subtitle of the journal. Some of us would prefer to eliminate the reference to “art” because we do far more than art and have no interest in privileging fine art. In fact, we avoid publishing work that belongs principally in art history journals. “Objects” is problematic as a designation for our subject matter since we are quite interested in “practices.” Indeed, some of us are even more concerned with what people do with things than the things themselves. And where are “bodies” in this parsing of materiality? The task, it would seem, is not to choose between bodies, practices, and things, but to understand their hybrid as the proper focus of religious materiality. Finally, “belief” has been thoroughly critiqued for several decades as something that belongs to some religions such as Christianity, but not to others (e.g. Jainism, Buddhism, Confucianism) as a primary feature of their self-understandings. Not wanting to privilege one religious tradition over another, we’ve continued to ponder the utility of any reference to “belief.” And yet believing is arguably a standard ingredient in any epistemology—if not religious belief, then certainly the belief that the earth will not slide out from beneath one’s feet from one minute to the next. David Hume spoke of belief in this sense: as the epistemological glue that keeps the world apprehensible. So perhaps it is possible to think about materializing belief. If so, if belief is more than affirming a proposition, if belief can refer to attitudes that emerge from the steady deposit of practices over time, then we can use the idea to help us understand embodiment as a learned set of behaviors, or techniques, as Marcel Mauss once wrote in a splendid essay, “Techniques of the Body.” Over the span of ten years, the journal has published work by scholars from at least twenty fields. The breakdown of the disciplines (by departmental or institutional affiliation) in which authors work is as follows:

Graven Images, an anthology of essays on comics and religion, is a text devoted to locating the function and potential of images in explorations and deconstructions of the religious. The title of the book is derived from the directive, in Exodus, that 'thou shalt not make unto thee a ...

Humans are game players. Such a designation began long before video games, but has taken on new significance in light of present technological advances. Video games are nothing new in relation to religion and humanity in general, yet they extend the designations of what it ...

The origins of Mormonism, like the origins of many American religious practices and beliefs, are deeply bound up with the birth of the Erie Canal, on whose banks the town of Palmyra grew. The early lives of both Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were nourished by canal-based social and economic developments, and ultimately the printing and distribution of the Book of Mormon would not have had an impact without the canalway.

Sometime in late September or early October of 2001, I announced to my classes that my companion, another professor at the college and the woman I have loved and lived with for the past eight years, had been diagnosed with cancer. I explained that I would be missing several days of class over the next month because of medical treatments.

Religion is a technological apparatus. Within the scholarly enterprise, religion is a heuristic term that is most useful when referring to worldmaking technologies that emerge within ever-adapting ecosystems of objects, including cultural products, the natural world, and human bodies. Chief among the technologies are those used in the construction of myths, rituals, beliefs, emotions, symbols, texts, gods, and spirits, as they are enacted and engaged in socially and aesthetically special spaces and times. This apparatus is principally mediated by the senses (including interoception, proprioception, and the five external senses), and functions to extend the human subject into its world, thereby transcending and often dissolving the self, just as the constructed worlds reach into sensing human bodies and modify them, compelling them to adapt behaviors to the collective ecosystem, as they sediment into distinct traditions. Through these processes, enchanting worlds are created and lived within, offering belonging, identity, and a sense of social and supernatural order, while rupturing or displacing other worlds that may operate with competing technologies.

For me, the promise of the digital has always been about reaching a broader public. Digital media can help translate scholarly, verbal-based work into other sensational forms: moving images, still images, music, sounds, graphs. With digital media we get something more "accessible," even perhaps more interesting since it appeals to the body, offering the opportunity to get out of the ocular- and logo-centrist pedagogies that dominate the humanities. But when the dean of my college asked me to contribute a class to the Harvard-MIT non-profit online venture called edX, I began with a dose of skepticism. Teaching a "regular" class about material and sensual religion was tricky enough. Doing it online seemed not only counter-intuitive but also foolhardy. A dedicated team of ITS staff and I set out to construct one of Hamilton College's first MOOCs (Massive Open Online Course), called "Spirituality and Sensuality: Sacred Objects in Religious Life." My concern was to make this unlike most other online courses: the reduction of creative content into a recorded lecture, identical to one in a classroom lecture hall. I wanted to push on what could be done with the medium. This chapter will describe the pleasures and perils of teaching an online course in such a manner. Stuck with a certain set of technological confines, the medium controls content, but also allows alternative content to come to the fore.

Religions are deeply, stubbornly physical and sensual. This course aims to re-imagine our understanding of religion by grounding traditions in physical encounters between human bodies and sensual objects.

Playing drums, telling stories, touching stones, creating wildly colorful altars, dancing, eating and drinking special substances are all basic religious activities. Examples will range across Native American, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish rituals and symbols, and materials will traverse fields from art history to anthropology, philosophy to poetry, science to religious studies. We will toggle between broad theories of religions and specific case studies.