This page was created by Craig Dietrich.
Scholarly Orientation
Contemporary studies of American religious folklore place an emphasis on describing, analyzing, and comparing the culture of communities defined by their religious belief systems. Such communities can be defined through shared geography; age; gender; economy; occupation; leisure; and medical, political, or other beliefs. Religious folklore stresses the significances of aesthetic or artistic creativity and creation; historical process; the varieties of construction of mental, verbal, or material forms; and the enduring relationship and subtle balance between utility and creativity to such forms within cultures. The methodology of religious folklife includes exhaustive historical research using all available historical sources as well as field studies including ethnographic observation, thick description, and interviewing. This method and subsequent analyses allows people to speak for themselves using their own aesthetic and classificatory systems