David Morgan comments on the entanglement of body, material culture, and lived religion in this article. Of particular use, he offers a set of operational definitions regarding material culture, embodiment, lived religion, aesthetics, and the material economy of the sacred.
Museum-ification of churches in Ethiopia, Russia and the U.S. establishes active reference points for new forms of public engagement. Antohin draws upon her experience of these sites as well as contextualization theory to explore how religious media are included in the interpretative space of ‘church-museums’. She suggests that in Ethiopia, where tourism is still a new industry, multiple subjectivities and modes of interpretation may emerge through the display and reception of religious media in a public context.
Lillia McEnaney explores James Bielo’s most recent book, an ethnography of a creationist theme park in Kentucky.
An essay on the details and aesthetic significance of a votive offering that artist Yves Klein made to St. Rita of Cascia. While art has always played an ineliminable role in the Judeo-Christian tradition, it seems that Klein was particularly sensitive to the entanglement of votive offering, economic sacrifice, and the experiential dimensions of ritual. In many of Klein's works, it would seem that the subsumption of art into religion has been inverted.
A set of reflections on the author’s training in visual and material culture at University College London and how that facilitated insights regarding her ethnographic study of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church.
A review of recent artwork by contemporary Balinese artist Citra Sasmita and her use of archetypal objects such as cloth and symbols drawn from nature.
