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Material Religion

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24 May 2021

Masculinity and the Body Languages of Catholicism

Podcast
From counting money to lifting four-ton statues, Italian Catholics in Brooklyn have a robust, embodied language to express their masculine devotion says Prof. Maldonado-Estrada in this interview about her new book, Lifeblood of the Parish.
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7 May 2021

It’s a kind of magic – Experiences with the Resisting Object

Response
"The body alone cannot deal with the language problem that we have," writes Alina Kokoschka in her response to our interview with Richard McGregor on images, aesthetics, and challenge of studying objects in Islam.
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30 April 2021

Following Resistance

Response
How can Islamic Studies help advance the study of religion and visual and material culture, asks Anna Bigelow in this response to our interview with Richard McGregor. One way is through "close attention to the subtleties" of context, method, and discipline that characterize work that intently follows the objects and their "multiple, shifting registers."
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8 March 2021

Following the Objects: Seeing Religion in Egypt and Syria

Podcast
Why do scholars of religion have such a variety of incomplete and messy tools to “follow the objects”? Find out with the curious stories of devotional objects from Cairo and Damascus as Candace Mixon speaks with Richard McGregor about Islam and the Devotional object.
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19 February 2021

The Moral Narratives of New Materialism and Posthumanism

Response
Who or what are the actors in Posthuman and New Materialist narratives, asks Peter J. Bräunlein in this response to our interview with Paul-Francois Tremlett. In the face of populist "great simplifiers like Trump Bolsonaro or Modi," what will scholars do with our increasingly complex and diverse narratives about religious change?
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14 September 2020

Navigating stasis and mobility: The journey of anointing oil

Podcast
How do material objects accrue spiritual capital? In this episode, Dr. Kathleen Openshaw shares a poignant story from a member of the Australia branch of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God. As we hear about the global journey of a vial of anointing oil, she explains how we invest objects with significance and connect them to sacred spaces. Especially for the migrant community of UCKG members in Australia, these connections work to collapse the false binary between stasis and mobility that seems so stark in our present moment.
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8 May 2017

Minority Religions in the Secret Police Archives

Podcast
James Kapaló takes us inside the Eastern European secret police archives to show us how minority and new religious groups were portrayed. We explore the visual and material presence of religious minorities in the secret police archives in Hungary, Romania and the Republic of Moldova.
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14 October 2013

Religion and Food

Podcast
This week we bring you an interview with Chris Silver speaking to Professor Michel Desjardins of Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada, on the topic of Religion and Food. Connections are made with recent turns in the academic study of religion (gender, materiality etc.), and other areas of study such as religion and nutrition/health.
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25 September 2013

Religious Artefacts of the Contemporary World

Response
"through examining [religions'] cultural products we come to notice the different kinds of relationships that exist between how these products are portrayed and intended by their creators, and how they actually go on to be perceived and experienced in wider society." The Religious Studies Project’s interview with Professor Carole M. Cusack of the University of Sydney covers an ambitious range of issues by tackling some huge open-ended questions:
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23 September 2013

Religion and Cultural Production

Podcast
"It is a truth generally acknowledged that religions have been the earliest and perhaps the chief progenitors of cultural products in human societies..." Clearly there is no shortage of data for scholars wishing to delve into this broad topic. But what do we actually mean by ‘cultural product’? How can we claim that ‘religion’ is producing these things in any meaningful way?
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24 June 2013

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,...
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27 May 2013

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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12 September 2012

Material Religion and Visual Culture: Objects as Visible, Invisible and Virtual

Response
David Morgan, Professor of Religion at Duke University, has written extensively on the subject of material and visual culture. In a recent interview with Christopher Cotter, he provides an overview of the field of material religion and introduces his new book The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling (2012). In this review, I briefly tease out some of the themes from the interview, present a few snippets from some of Morgan’s publications and finally,
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10 September 2012

Material Religion

Podcast
In this episode, Chris Cotter talks to David Morgan about the fast-growing sub-field of material religion.
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The views expressed in podcasts, features and responses are the views of the individual contributors, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Religious Studies Project or our sponsors. The Religious Studies Project is produced by the Religious Studies Project Association (SCIO), a Scottish Charitable Incorporated Organisation (charity number SC047750).