Reimagining Religious Imagination, in Theory and in Practice

Jack Miles, Religion as We Know It: An Origin Story (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 2020). T.M. Luhrmann, How God Becomes Real: Kindling the Presence of Invisible Others (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020). David Morgan, Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei, The Life of Imagination: Revealing and Making the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018). Jeffrey J. Kripal, The Flip: Epiphanies of Mind and the Future of Knowledge (New York: Bellevue Literary Press, 2019). Jeffrey J. Kripal, Secret Body: Erotic and Esoteric Currents in the History of Religions (University of Chicago Press, 2017). Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018).

Neighbours, neighbouring and acquaintanceship: in dialogue with David Morgan

In 2012, David Morgan gave a talk titled ‘Neighbours, neighbouring and acquaintanceship: some further thoughts’ at the University of Turku, Finland. In this article we engage in dialogue with Morgan’s talk, as well as his 2009 book Acquaintances, in particular the observations he made about the simultaneous closeness and distance that characterises neighbouring relationships. We suggest that using the metaphors of elasticity and stickiness instead allows us to explore neighbouring relationships as more than inhabiting a space between intimates and strangers (Morgan, 2009), but as textured and messy everyday relationalities. We consider also how the ‘stickiness’ of this relationship as well as the significance of its ‘elasticity’ are likely to have been heightened during COVID-19 lockdowns, which have altered the usual configurations of intimate and stranger relationships. In doing so, our aim is to contribute further to Morgan’s theorising of the nature of neighbouring as a specific form of acquaintanceship.

Two families, many stories and the value of autobiography

This article is based on many enjoyable conversations with David Morgan over the years, on the topic of our own lived experiences of ‘family’. In order to consider them more systematically, we each wrote an autobiographical account of our experiences up to the age of eighteen, and began to compare them sociologically. When David died in June 2020 the project was by no means finished but he had left a preliminary paper, largely in note form, which he had presented to the annual meeting of the BSA (British Sociological Association) Auto/Biography study group in 2018. I have taken those notes and developed them into this article. It is not intended to be a polished academic piece. It is an account of an unfinished project, in which I have tried to stay as close as possible to David’s notes whilst making it appropriate for a readership rather than an audience.<br />Janet Finch

“Like a doll …”

In the 1990s there was a growing and renewed interest on the practice of clothing images of saints after, as Richard Trexler put it, the negligence demonstrated towards it by art historians until then. In 2018, following the publication of new and unprejudiced studies about it, the presence of two dresses belonging to statues of the Virgin Mary in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s exhibition “Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination” testified to the impact clothed images had on fashion creators and, according to David Morgan, the Church’s ritual and performative life. While focusing on the miraculous image of Nossa Senhora da Lapa from Quintela, Portugal, this article aims to acknowledge the many roles played by its clothes and jewels, assessing the complexity of this phenomenon and aiming for a wider understanding of how the faithful engaged with devotional sculpture.

The Material Dimension of the Bible from Print to Digital Text

The chapter addresses the material dimension of the Bible in the discourse and practice of evangelical and Pentecostal Christians. According to surveys commissioned by the American Bible Society, announcements from big Bible publishers, and my own observations among contemporary evangelical and Pentecostal Christians in America, digital Bibles and Bible apps are on the rise. The transition from print culture to digital culture has not gone uncontested, and the discussions among Christians about the appropriateness of digital Bible media for religious practices points toward a contestation of the materiality of the medium through which God’s Word, and thereby God, is made present to religious practitioners. Thus the first part of the chapter introduces the frame of material culture studies and the approach to materiality in the study of religion. The second part discusses an analytic model suggested by the material religion scholar David Morgan along which a material analysis of religious objects should be developed. It will subsequently be applied to explore the relation between the Bible and its concrete materiality with a comparative focus on print and digital versions of the Bible.

Comunicação visual e protestantismo no Brasil: evidências iconoclastas na implantação do Cristo Redentor

Estudo bibliográfico-documental no interstício da comunicação visual e da religiosidade no Brasil. Analisa eventos no entorno da implantação do Cristo Redentor, no Rio de Janeiro, momento em que a questão da imagem emerge nas dimensões social, política e religiosa. Tem como recorte específico os embates dos protestantes, que, naquele momento, reviveram aspectos do longo debate cristão sobre a imagem. Utiliza-se da análise contextual, ressaltando a conjuntura da República então recentemente inaugurada no país. A estratégia investigativa toma as construções argumentativas pró e contra a realização do monumento. Os argumentos analisados desvelam disputas religiosas na redefinição político social no país; e revelam a centralidade da questão da imagem na construção argumentativa de tais embates. A descrição da operação iconoclasta de David Morgan (2005) oferece o suporte teórico para a análise, que também incorpora reflexões de Alberto Klein, Norval Baitello e Malena Contrera, além de leituras da antropologia e sociologia da religião. A conclusão aponta para: a centralidade da comunicação visual nas práticas religiosas brasileiras; a confirmação de uma perspectiva iconoclasta no protestantismo nacional; a vigência de indefinições entre público e privado no período analisado.