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Introduction to Religious Things

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Things help make religions in our multi-sensory world.

Even the most iconoclastic faith traditions rely on haptic encounters within a material environment.

We make religions based on beliefs and ideas, but we also make them with things--not just purposely crafted liturgical items but also ordinary things such as clothing and food, art, buildings, natural objects, historical artifacts, and human bodies, among others. (1) Such things become the objects of religions (2), which we use in purpose-built landscapes, in wildernesses, and at home. We see, touch, hear, smell, taste, perform, and negotiate our religions everywhere, every day.

This gallery contains four interrelated collections of Religious Things drawn from diverse cultures around the globe and across time. Each gallery has been curated by a different student expert. Curators researched and selected the items in their galleries in response to a particular problem or theme in the study of material religions, then composed an interpretative essay and a label for each item. Themes and terms (collectively authored) link objects among the four collections. A bibliography is attached to each gallery.

You can:

Choose a path and explore a gallery.
Search across galleries by following a theme word.
Learn more about material religions in our index of important terms.

This virtual exhibition of Religious Things is an ongoing collaborative project that we hope will grow.
April, 2021

(1) Useful studies of material religions include: Colleen McDannell, Material Christianity: Religion and Popular Culture in America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); David Morgan, Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018); Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer, eds., Things: Religions and the Question of Materiality (New York: Fordham University Press, 2011).
(2) Bill Brown, "Thing Theory," Critical Inquiry 38 (2001): 1-22.

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The Mundane Tree by Oluf Olufson