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Materializing Religion

Expression, Performance and Ritual

William Keenan author Elisabeth Arweck editor

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Taylor & Francis Ltd

Published:4th Aug '06

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Materializing Religion cover

The material symbol has become central to understanding religion in late modernity. Overtly theological approaches use words to express the values and faith of a religion, but leave out the 'incarnation' of religion in the behavioural, performative, or audio-visual form. This book explores the lived experience of religion through its material expressions, demonstrating how religion and spirituality are given form and are thus far from being detached or ethereal. Cutting across cultures, senses, disciplines and faiths, the contributors register the variety in which religions and religious groups express the sacred and numinous. Including chapters on music, architecture, festivals, ritual, artifacts, dance, dress and magic, this book offers an invaluable resource to students of sociology and anthropology of religion, art, culture, history, liturgy, theories of late modern culture, and religious studies.

’... provides a wealth of information and theory to show how people create and re-create religious meaning and in turn find religious sustenance.’ Communication Research Trends ’... a fascinating study of the ways in which religious sentiment becomes inextricably imbedded in, and expressed by and through, landscape, architecture, clothing, music and dance. At its best it breaks the shackles of narrow disciplinary boundaries and conventional academic inhibitions, identifying a network of connections as to how the numinous is manifested through the material. I will continue to dip into this book, revelling in the quality of the writing and the scholarship, confident that new insights will reveal themselves.’ Culture and Religion ’In reading all the essays, one is struck by the unexpected directions from which some contributors come to topics in original and illuminating ways that throw unexpected light on larger adjacent areas in the sociology of religion.’ New Blackfriars ’... a varied collection on architecture, music, pilgrimage, dance, witchcraft, and dress... There are real strengths here...’ Sociology of Religion

ISBN: 9780754650942

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 521g

264 pages