Durham

Material Religion Roundtable

Podcast
What exactly does Material Religion bring to Religious Studies? Is it a potentially revolutionary phenomenon, or merely a passing fad? How might one apply the theoretical perspectives and methodologies developed in this growing field to some of the defining debates of our subject area? To discuss these issues, and reflect on the conference in general,...

A Field Little Plowed? The Study of Religion and the Built Environment Today

Response
"[My dissertation] in Religious Studies [...] begins with the premise that the built environment has been over-emphasized to the detriment of other modes of creating and maintaining sacred space." Let me begin with a mythological allusion. The Roman god Janus was often depicted with two faces to signify his interstitial nature. He looked into the future and past, and oversaw beginnings and endings.

Peter Collins on Religion and the Built Environment

Podcast
Buildings dominate our skylines, they shape the nature, size, sound and smell of events within their walls, they provide a connection to the recent and distant past, and they serve as a physical, material instantiation of any number of contextual discourses. But what about the relationship between 'religion' and these (generally) human-made structures?
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