Search Results

The artworks under discussion detail the scope and breadth of art that can be described as spiritual by virtue of its revelatory, revitalizing and contemplative capacities. Rather than interrogating the relationship between art and religion, more pertinent questions in the contemporary age are: What is the nature of the dialogue between art and spirituality, how do the two come together, and what form does the meeting take? The range of multimedia brings novel forms of encounter that occur outside the gallery and other spaces and involve audio-visual and other means of articulating the spiritual. These new forms make different demands on viewers; they create greater intimacy (often through immersion), both physically and psychologically, and one of the consequences of having greater intimacy can be a heightened awareness that increases presentness and a sense of embodiment. What we learn is that there are potentially as many interpretations of spirituality as there are viewers.

Athletic events occur in discrete locations, played by individuals following a prescribed set of rules, leaving behind metrics like wins and losses, final scores, and overall records. So on the surface, the empirical facts of sports are rather mundane. And yet, for devoted participants and observers, physical movements and calculated numbers feed into carefully constructed worlds of mythic stories, potent symbols, and exuberant rituals. The story of religion and sports in America, then, starts with bodies in motion. It continues as these bodies become inscribed with sacred meaning, each mark bearing the traces of a given population’s most cherished values. Institutional religions have been part of this story. From the “muscular Christians” of the Progressive Era to a contemporary Muslim football team observing the Ramadan fast during a playoff run, Americans have habitually turned playing fields into praying fields. Sports have also figured into the making of America’s civil religious discourse, as athletic expressions of national identity. In these instances, bodies in motion have reinforced or disrupted the boundaries that separate “real” Americans from those perceived to threaten social stability. Beyond institutional and civil religions, though, religious themes and ideas continue to attach themselves to sports in new and innovative ways. Understanding this process requires an unbraiding of the category of “religion” from notions of “God” and “belief.” Instead, we profit from an understanding of religion that starts with embodied movements, and continues into the material production of the sacred. From here, sports become locations to experiment with, and experience, what it means to be human. And this is where the attraction to sports originates, both in the past and in the present.

In recent years, the study of religion has undergone a useful materialization in the work of many scholars, who are not inclined to define it in terms of ideas, creeds, or doctrines alone, but want to understand what role sensation, emotion, objects, spaces, clothing, and food have played in religious practice. If the intellect and the will dominated the study of religion dedicated to theology and ethics, the materialization of religious studies has taken up the role of the body, expanding our understanding of it and dismantling our preconceptions, which were often notions inherited from religious traditions. As a result, the body has become a broad register or framework for gauging the social, aesthetic, and practical character of religion in everyday life. The interest in material culture as a primary feature of religion has unfolded in tandem with the new significance of the body and the broad materialization of religious studies.

The study of the material culture of religion represents a long-established interest in material artifacts as sources of information about religious cultures. But it also has featured a turn since the 1990s toward recognizing that the dominant dependence on texts tends to dematerialize religion by turning it into a system of ideas, a body of creeds or teachings, a worldview, or a discourse. Religions are more than ideas or dogmas, because they are about things, bodies, animals, places, and natural events and forces. These are not mere signifiers of value but the very medium in which religions take shape. The emphasis on texts and ideas reflects the strong influence of classical humanism and Christianity, both of which privilege human agency as sovereign and unparalleled in nature. Since the late 20th century, scholars in the social sciences and humanities have been rethinking received conceptions of matter, causality, and sociality. As a result, what has come to be called the “new materialism” amounts to a broad effort to reconceive the place of human beings in the natural world by recognizing ecologies as the basic unit of relation in nature: nothing exists in isolation but participates in networks of interdependent interactions. This realization urges that things are not dead matter waiting for the thinking substance of mind to endow them with purpose but rather are indeterminate and emergent actors exhibiting agency in their effect upon other things. Such an approach offers a stimulating framework for the study of religions, because it stresses the importance of materiality. By training attention on things and their environments, scholars of religion can scrutinize how the material conditions and artifacts of religious practice and belief exert agency, how they change over time, and how they interact with discourse and thought. Things are not stable or unitary. They exist within ecologies of time as well as space. So, the material study of religion is always also the historical study of religion. Artifacts are produced with histories behind them and used within specifiable contexts. But artifacts are never only what their producers intended them for. They are passed down, modified, repurposed, or destroyed. This means that objects exhibit a cultural biography, or even a series of lives. It also means that waste is a category of materiality that is important to recognize. The idea of “material culture” will seem at odds with the new materialism’s scope to scrutinize materiality far beyond human culture. But the deeper recognition at stake is realizing that human beings are incomplete without things, without their ecological connections to objects, places, animals, and people. Culture is all manner of ways in which human beings produce and are produced by these connections. The materiality of culture consists of the embodied, emplaced, and interactive nature of the connections. The emphasis on things has allowed the recognition of their repressed or overlooked agencies. That is because thingness resists lasting objectification. Human beings and other animals craft objects and places, but they do not last. They change over time, are appropriated by others or repurposed, and they decay and are destroyed. In its capacity to be different kinds of objects, a thing is always more than an object.

This article examines the way that the hurting body enhances, deepens, and informs religious experience. It begins by examining the contested category of religious experience, contrasting the essentialist with the constructivist approaches. Both are complicated by consideration of embodiment—specifically, of the body in pain. Two concrete cases of religious pain, or sharp discomfort, are discussed as illustrations of a qualitative approach to studying pain and religious experience. This method is evaluated against two examples of a quantitative method. The article concludes that a qualitative interpretation of the meaning, rather than the analysis of causes, of religious hurting are superior, within specified parameters. Finally, the qualitative method requires an exposition that takes the form of a narrative in which the researcher acts as a close observer–participant.

Erotic representations of the divine occupy a pivotal place in religious myths, poetry, liturgy, and theology. Reading eros as a category of religious love highlights its ubiquitous presence in sacred literary sources; moreover, it renders the nexus of erotic love and the divine critical to comprehending religiosity as an immanent and embodied phenomenon, rather than as an abstract idea. As an embodied phenomenon, religious love is subject to an investigation of topics such as gender and sexuality, and its multiple cultural meanings and contexts. Western philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, (Pseudo-)Dionysius, and the Neoplatonist renaissance thinker Leone Ebreo, delineate a hierarchy or a “ladder of love” differentiating lesser and higher subjects and objects of love from love of the particular, to the universal, cosmic, and divine. An interrelated distinction is ascertained between “desire” as a state of lack often seen as a lower state, and “love” as the higher state, in which fulfillment and joy of the union with the object of one’s love is achieved. Love and desire as marked yet interrelated emotions are contextualized in religious phenomena cross-culturally, most obviously in theistic frameworks in which a personal and intimate relationship with the divine is an ideal. Poetry and autobiography are the most common genre of depicting the intimate and passionate encounter of human and divine. Despite the prominence of male voices in the sources, the contributions of medieval Christian and Muslim women mystics to this literature are significant. Key base-texts from which mystics and philosophers are inspired and draw upon to elucidate their own personal experience of yearning for the divine, include the biblical Song of Songs, Bhagavata Purana (Book 10), and the Gitagovinda. Although the yearning for the divine, associated with an emotional, embodied state and therefore seen as problematic from a rational perspective, this yearning is also a cherished state, even for rationalists such as the medieval Jewish thinker Moses Maimonides. The significance of erotic love for the divine is confirmed, not only by Sufi and Hindu bhakti poets such as Rumi and Jayadeva, but also by philosophers such as Ibn Arabi and Rupa-Goswami. The idiom of erotic desire and love for God is particularly poignant and integral not only in poetry but also in theology, as exemplified in Hindu bhakti and Christian theology. Exploring the meanings of erotic love in religious poetry, theology, liturgy, and the history of religion more broadly offers a rich scholarly and personal medium for contemplating the reality of human and divine nature.