The Scholarship on Spanish Mystical Literature

An engaging critical review is offered of scholarly works on Spanish mystical literature during the twentieth and early twenty-first century in Europe and the Americas. Bringing together for the first time an ample variety of sources, and letting the scholars’ own voices be heard, this study asks how their writings were influenced by their particular notions about mysticism and Spain’s relationship with the Orient. A thematic survey like this one illustrates how ideas are created and re-created throughout time, resulting in the production of a more diverse scholarship. Readers will be enriched with a renewed sense of disciplinary awareness.

Religion and the Arts in The Hunger Games

In this selective overview of scholarship generated by The Hunger Games—the young adult dystopian fiction and film series which has won popular and critical acclaim—Zhange Ni showcases various investigations into the entanglement of religion and the arts in the new millennium. Ni introduces theories, methods, and the latest developments in the study of religion in relation to state politics, audio/visual art, material culture, reality TV, and transmedia projects, whilst also reading The Hunger Games as a story that explores the variety, complexity, and ambiguity of enchantment. In popular texts such as The Hunger Games, religion and art—both broadly construed, that is, beyond conventional boundaries—converge in creating an enchantment that makes life more bearable and effects change in the world.

Religion and the Digital Arts

This slim volume offers a thematic exploration of religion and the digital arts. Over the course of six brief sections, this extended essay examines identity and community, authority and authenticity, word and image, ritual and practice, body and space, and myth and faith. Each of these paired sets is explored in concert with technologically inflected correlates. For instance, identity and community are paired with avatars and networks. These twin concepts provide the thematic anchor of each section. Each section looks at four works of digital art with each work employing digital technology in a unique way. The works include virtual and augmented reality pieces, 3D printed sculptures, digital photography, and digitally enabled performance pieces and installations and span the late 1990s to the present. This essay is an introduction to religion and the digital arts and, while no single conclusion can be drawn from such an expansive and diverse field, the reassertion of the religious and theological importance of the body and emotions in the face of digital technology emerges as a recurrent theme.

Architecture of the World’s Major Religions

In Architecture of the World’s Major Religions: An Essay on Themes, Differences, and Similarities, religious architecture is presented and explained in ways that challenge predominant presumptions regarding its aesthetic, formal, spatial, and scenographic elements. Two positions frame its narrative: religious architecture is an amalgam of aesthetic, social, political, cultural, economic, and doctrinal elements; and these elements are materialized in often very different ways in the world’s principal religions. Central to the essay’s theoretical approaches is the communicative and discursive agency of religious architecture, and the multisensory and ritual spaces it provides to create and deliver content. Subsequently, mythical and scriptural foundations, and symbols of ecclesiastical and political power are of equal interest to formal organizations of thresholds, paths, courts, and centers, and celestial and geometric alignments. Moreover, it is equally concerned with the aesthetic—visual and material cultures and the transcendent realms they were designed to evoke, as it is with the kinesthetic—the dynamic and multisensory experience of place and the tangible experiences of the body’s interactions with architecture.

Religion and Prison Art in Ming China (1368–1644)

Approaching the prison as a creative environment and imprisoned officials as creative subjects in Ming China (1368–1644), Ying Zhang introduces a few important themes at the intersection of premodern Chinese religion, poetry, and visual and material culture. The Ming is known for its extraordinary cultural and economic accomplishments in the increasingly globalized early modern world. For scholars of Chinese religion and art, this era crystallizes the essential and enduring characteristics in these two spheres. Drawing on scholarship on Chinese philosophy, religion, aesthetics, poetry, music, and visual and material culture, Zhang illustrates how the prisoners understood their environment as creative and engaged it creatively. She then offers a literature survey on the characteristics of premodern Chinese religion and art that helps situate the questions of “creative environment” and “creative subject” within multiple fields of scholarship.

Intersections between Jews and Media

In this volume, the relationship between Jews and media is not only vividly illustrated, but it is consciously drawn into the formation of modern Jewish history and modern media. Maya Balakirsky Katz addresses key Jewish-media intersections in which Jews and mass media implicated (or were implicated by) one another. In this study, Katz discusses the relationship that Jews have had with mass media forms of print, film, photography, advertising, and postcards within the periods that these media have gained cultural ascendancy. These historical moments are tethered to a broader conversation addressing the major theoretical issues at the center of the discourse on Jews and media. Bearing this mutually constructive relationship in mind, Intersections between Jews and Media offers both a tangible demographic portrait of the real Jews who entered mass media and lays a theoretical and methodological framework for more qualitative analyses.

Religion and Literature: History and Method

Religion and literature is the study of interrelationships between religious or theological traditions and literary traditions, both oral and written, with special attention to religious or theological underpinnings of, influences upon, and reflections in, individual “texts” (oral and written) or authors’ oeuvres. This overview considers the origins and history of, and methods employed in, that scholarly enterprise, focusing upon the dual construals of “literature” in religious studies (as a body of sacred writings and as writing valued for artistic merit); the problematics of defining “religion”; the transformation of theology and literature as a “field” (pioneered by Nathan A. Scott Jr. et al.) to religion and literature; the affiliated fields of myth criticism, and of biblical reception; and the institutionalization, globalization, and future of the study of religion and literature.

Modern Jewish Art

In Modern Jewish Art: Definitions, Problems, and Opportunities, Ori Z. Soltes considers both the emerging and evolving discussion on and the expanding array of practitioners of ‘Jewish art’ in the past two hundred years. He notes the developing problem of how to define ‘Judaism’ in the 19th century—as a religion, a culture, a race, a nation, a people—and thus the complications for placing ‘Jewish art’ under the extended umbrella of ‘religion and the arts.’ The fluidity with which one must engage the subject is reflected in the broadening conceptual and visual vocabulary, the extended range of subject foci and media, and the increasingly rich analytical approaches to the subject that have surfaced particularly in the past fifty years. Well-known and little-known artists are included in a far-ranging discussion of painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation art, ceremonial objects, and works that blur the boundaries between categories.

A History of Theory and Method in the Study of Religion and Dance

The relationship between religion and dance is as old as humankind. Contemporary methods for studying this relationship date back a century. The difference between these two time frames is significant: scholars are still developing theories and methods capable of illuminating this vast history that take account of their limited place within it. A History of Theory and Method in the Study of Religion and Dance takes on a primary challenge of doing so: overcoming a conceptual dichotomy between “religion” and “dance” forged in the colonial era that justified western Christian hostility towards dance traditions across six continents over six centuries. Beginning with its enlightenment roots, LaMothe narrates a selective history of this dichotomy, revealing its ongoing work in separating dance studies from religious studies. Turning to the Bushmen of the African Kalahari, LaMothe introduces an ecokinetic approach that provides scholars with conceptual resources for mapping the generative interdependence of phenomena that appear as “dance” and/or “religion.”

Clothing as Devotion in Contemporary Hinduism

In Clothing as Devotion in Contemporary Hinduism, Urmila Mohan explores the materiality and visuality of cloth and clothing as devotional media in contemporary Hinduism. Drawing upon ethnographic research into the global missionizing group “International Society for Krishna Consciousness” (ISKCON), she studies translocal spaces of worship, service, education, and daily life in the group’s headquarters in Mayapur and other parts of India. Focusing on the actions and values of deity dressmaking, devotee clothing and paraphernalia, Mohan shows how activities, such as embroidery and chanting, can be understood as techniques of spirituality, reverence, allegiance—and she proposes the new term “efficacious intimacy” to help understand these complex processes. The monograph brings theoretical advances in Anglo-European material culture and material religion studies into a conversation with South Asian anthropology, sociology, art history, and religion. Ultimately, it demonstrates how embodied interactions as well as representations shape ISKCON’s practitioners as devout subjects, while connecting them with the divine and the wider community.