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Preface
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Preface This book has grown out of the international conference Things: Material Religion and the Topography of Divine Spaces, organized in Amsterdam on June 11 and 12, 2007, on behalf of the research program The Future of the Religious Past, funded by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). Most of the contributions are based on papers presented during the conference, but we have added a number of essays to enable an even richer and more profound discussion of the topic than the conference already allowed. This topic is the relationship between religion and materiality: more specifically, the flawed notion that the relation between religion and ‘‘things’’ is inherently antagonistic. This notion, which has long informed the modern study of religion, has recently begun to be questioned, giving rise to a timely turn to matter and materiality in the humanities and social sciences. Religion cannot persist, let alone thrive, without the material things that serve to make it present—visible and tangible—in the world. The image of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Paris—Sacré Coeur, built as an embodiment of a conservative moral order in the aftermath of the Commune—on the cover of this book powerfully evokes the politicoreligious use of material registers. Even a simple comparison of our own disciplines, sociology (Houtman ) and cultural anthropology (Meyer), suffices to reveal that this material turn is, nonetheless, not occurring everywhere equally. Whereas anthropology of religion is one of the major driving forces behind it, sociology of religion has remained by and large untouched until the present day. One can even argue that sociology has moved in precisely the opposite direction, becoming increasingly interested in ‘‘interior’’ aspects of religion that it had traditionally neglected. Due to this change in perspective, sociology’s long-standing focus on religion’s ‘‘external’’ institutional manifestations (the churches, in particular), an emphasis Thomas Luckmann influentially critiqued as early as the 1960s, is now waning, with attention shifting from ‘‘religious belonging’’ to ‘‘religious believing,’’ from ‘‘churched religion’’ to ‘‘unchurched spirituality,’’ and from ‘‘religious belief’’ to ‘‘religious experience.’’ x v P R E FACE Nonetheless, in most other academic fields, matter and materiality are now increasingly given their due, and the antagonism between spirit and matter is no longer simply taken for granted. We hope that this book will contribute to further unsettling this modern divide. We owe a well-deserved word of thanks to Marry Kooy, who has assisted us in a wonderfully accurate, careful, and cheerful manner throughout this book project. Without her help, the process would have taken us much longer and would have been much less smooth, too. We are also grateful to Helen Tartar, of Fordham University Press, whose experience as a humanities editor has been very helpful in making decisions about the book’s composition and no less vital in the final editing of the individual contributions . It has been a privilege and a pleasure to work with her. Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer Rotterdam and Berlin/Amsterdam August 2011 x vi [18.209.63.120] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 19:20 GMT) Things ...