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.

About the Author

Elisabeth Arweck is Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Education, University of Warwick, UK. She is Editor (with Peter Clarke) of the Journal of Contemporary Religion and has published Researching New Religious Movements: Responses and Redefinitions (2006), Theorizing Faith: The Insider/Outsider Problem in the Study of Ritual (2002) with Martin Stringer, and New Religious Movements in Western Europe: An Annotated Bibliography (1997) with Peter Clarke. William Keenan is Senior Lecturer in Sociology in the Division of Politics and Sociology at Nottingham Trent University, UK. He has published extensively on sacred dress and related aspects of symbolic culture, most recently in Theory, Culture & Society, Body & Society, British Journal of Sociology, Fashion Theory, Mortality, Religion, European Journal of Social Theory, and New International Encyclopaedia of Social and Behavioral Sciences. He edited and contributed two articles on dress studies and dress freedoms to Dressed to Impress: Looking the Part (2001), and has articles on dress, body and belief in a number of edited collections, including Undressing Religion: Commitment and Conversion from a Cross-Cultural Perspective (2000), and As Others See Us: Selected Essays in Human Communication (2004).

Reviews
'... 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



Book Information
ISBN 9781032099798
Author William Keenan
Format Paperback
Page Count 258
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 371g