Introduction

By combining the study of early modern everyday religion and the study of material culture, new light is shed on daily religious beliefs, practices, and identities. This chapter examines what the material record discloses about everyday religion in the light of new theoretical developments in material culture studies and studies of material religion in anthropology and sociology. It sets out how detailed, qualitative analysis of inventories and objects provides access to the inner devotional lives of Prague burghers. The analysis is embedded in a broader discourse of religion and material culture across the early modern world. It situates the study in a wider context by comparing and contrasting seventeenth-century Prague to milieus elsewhere in Europe.

Forging Chinese Christian Digital Fellowship: Social Media and Transnational Connectivity

The chapter addresses two main questions: ‘Why do Chinese Christians seek to establish transnational connections through religion?’ and ‘How are these connections established?’ It first discusses how the ubiquity of mobile social media has enabled Chinese Christians to use social media for religious communication. This is followed by an examination the Christian concept of fellowship as the key to understanding the formation of transnational Christian networks via social media. Two processes in social media, namely, media mixing and intercontextuality, facilitate the integration of the ‘religious’ into Christian users’ daily lives. In this sense, Chinese Christian transnational fellowship in social media is also about the practice of everyday religion. The chapter also examines some limitations of the use of social media for building fellowship, particularly with reference to China’s political environment and Internet regulatory regime.

Nowhere and Everywhere

This article investigates the intergenerational transmission of craft making, including the role religion and spirituality play in this transmission. The theoretical approach is based on everyday religion and Bengtson’s theory of intergenerational solidarity. The data for this qualitative study was collected in interviews. The results show that warm relationships and closeness between generations are at the heart of transmission: craft making brings different generations together, creates space for intimate relationships, and serves as a way of showing care for children and grandchildren. What about religion? At first glance it seems absent. However, a closer look reveals multiple religious aspects of this process, such as transmitted values and shared craft-making moments associated with religious memories and experiences. Above all, craft making is a venue for warmth and closeness between generations, which is at the heart of religious transmission.

‘ISIS is not Islam’: Epistemic Injustice, Everyday Religion, and Young Muslims’ Narrative Resistance

Powerful narratives that invoke religious concepts—jihad, Sharia, shahid, Caliphate, kuffar, and al-Qiyāmah—have accompanied jihadi violence but also inspired robust counter-narratives from Muslims. Taking a narrative criminological approach, we explore the rejection of religious extremism that emerges in everyday interactions in a religious community under intense pressure in Western societies. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 90 young Muslims in Norway, we argue that young Muslims suffer epistemic injustice in their narrative exclusion from the mainstream and assess the narrative credibility they try to maintain in the face of marginalization. We suggest that young Muslims’ religious narratives reject a mainstream characterization of Islam as essentially a religion of aggression and simultaneously join forces with that mainstream in seeking the narrative exclusion of the jihadi extremists.