Sensational Religion

Sensory Cultures in Material Practice

Promey Sally M.

The result of a collaborative, multi year project, this groundbreaking book explores the interpretive worlds that inform religious practice and derive from sensory phenomena. Under the rubric of "making sense", the studies assembled here ask, How have people used and valued sensory data? How have they shaped their material and immaterial worlds to encourage or discourage certain kinds or patterns of sensory experience? How have they framed the sensual capacities of images and objects to license a range of behaviours, including iconoclasm, censorship, and accusations of blasphemy or sacrilege? Exposing the dematerialization of religion embedded in secularization theory, editor Sally Promey proposes a fundamental reorientation in understanding the personal, social, political, and cultural work accomplished in religion's sensory and material practice. "Sensational Religion" refocuses scholarly attention on the robust material entanglements often discounted by modernity's metaphysic and on their inextricable connections to human bodies, behaviours, affects, and beliefs.

About the Author

Sally M. Promey is professor of American studies and professor of religion and visual culture at Yale University, where she is also founding director of the Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion and deputy director of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music.

Reviews

"At the busy crossroads of debates on secularism, post-structuralist work on embodiment and subjectivity, sensory cultural studies and the philosophical turn to the materiality and agency of things, we find this brilliant collection of 37 essays on 'Sensational Religion'. Their empirical robustness and theoretical sophistication assures that the analysis of religion remains on the crucial, cutting edge for understanding social life" – Angela Zito, Center for Religion and Media

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