Sonja Luehrmann/Соня Люрман (1975–2019)

I first met Sonja Luehrmann in 2005 at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle, Germany, some 300 kilometers from her native Marburg. We were there for a conference organized by Chris Hann and Hermann Goltz on the anthropology of Eastern Christianity, and I was thrilled to meet someone else working on Orthodox Christianity in the formerly Soviet, Finno-Ugric world, a fellow traveler in that minute subdisciplinary niche. We got to talking during one of the conference coffee breaks, comparing religious cognates in Mari and Estonian (God is iumo in Mari, jumal in Estonian) to tease out connections between our fields. Five minutes into our conversation, I knew I had met someone whose thinking and work would be a profound influence on me and many, many others. In her wonderfully intense way, Sonja shot right past conference pleasantries, getting into the thick of comparison and giving me a small window into her critically attuned curiosity about everything. This was a conversation that changed my professional life and began a treasured friendship. Later on, when we visited the Chapel of the Holy Cross, an Orthodox house church in Halle, I noticed Sonja steal away to light a candle and spend some moments alone before an icon. Perhaps she was thinking of one of the akathist prayers she wrote so insightfully about? As I got to know Sonja over the years, I realize that this was a moment when someone who thought deeply about religion and secularity was living the overlaps between those deeply intertwined spheres.

Fast forward to the summers of 2013 and 2014, when Sonja brought a group of us together in Cluj, Romania, and Thessaloniki, Greece, as part of an interdisciplinary project on sensory spirituality in Orthodox Christianity funded by her prestigious Social Science Research Council grant. It was during those weeks together that Daria Dubovka, Angie Heo, Zhanna (Jeanne) Kormina, Vlad Naumescu, Simion Pop, and I were able to experience the fullness of Sonja’s prodigious intellectual leadership, charitable friendship and hospitality, and her sneaky, subversive humor (she joked about being confused with “that other famous anthropologist” Tanya Luhrmann). Being in Sonja’s presence so intensely for those weeks made us better listeners and readers, and I remember with special fondness seeing Sonja slip intuitively into ethnographer mode at whatever monastery, museum, or church we found ourselves in. In conversation later on, it was Sonja’s observations that brought clarity to the day’s experiences. Thanks to Sonja, those weeks were a master class on the intersensorial and intermaterial dimensions of religion and on pushing one’s ethnographic data toward its fullest significance. In Praying with the Senses: Contemporary Orthodox Spirituality in Practice (2018), the book that emerged from this project, Sonja wrote that we, the authors, “would like to thank one another for helping each of us see Orthodox Christianity in ways none of us could have done individually.”¹ As true as that is, it was Sonja who guided us and inspired us, in this project and beyond.

Sonja’s work on religion, secularity, atheism, and contemporary Russia speaks for itself, as does its extensive impact and recognition. She had the gift of integrating sensitive, critical, historically aware ethnography into the sweep of the anthropological tradition in transformative ways. She told important stories through her work and about the incredible places and histories her life traversed. Sonja was the best kind of friend and colleague – humble, eager to know, a dazzling intellect, feverishly productive, straightforward with critique, and capacious in her professional and personal generosity. Her work is something I and many others will learn from for the rest of our lives.

I saw Sonja for the last time in July 2019 on the day before her birthday in Tallinn, Estonia. Sonja never stayed put in Canada for long, especially if there was an opportunity to connect with colleagues and share her work somewhere. Sonja’s response to the health challenges she faced was to keep connecting and writing: she had just delivered a keynote at the 2019 European Association for the Study of Religions conference in Tartu and spent some days writing...