Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality

Notes

Notes Introduction: Material Religion—How Things Matter, by Birgit Meyer and Dick Houtman note: We would like to thank Petra Gehring, Galit Hasan-Rokem, Niklaus Largier, David Morgan, Mattijs van de Port, Irene Stengs, Terje Stordalen, and Jojada Verrips for helpful suggestions and encouragement in writing this Introduction. Birgit Meyer wishes to acknowledge that she worked on this text during her affiliation as a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Studies, Berlin (2010–11). 1. See: Dick Houtman and Stef Aupers, eds., Religions of Modernity: Relocating the Sacred to the Self and the Digital (Leiden: Brill, 2010); Peter van der Veer, ‘‘Spirit,’’ Material Religion 7, no. 1 (2011): 124–31; Peter van der Veer, ‘‘Spirituality in Modern Society,’’ in Religion: Beyond a Concept, ed. Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 789–98; Peter van der Veer, ‘‘Spirituality : East and West,’’ Eranos Yearbook 69 (2010): 45–61; Paul Heelas, The New Age Movement: The Celebration of the Self and the Sacralisation of Modernity (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996); Paul Heelas, Linda Woodhead, et al., The Spiritual Revolution: Why Religion Is Giving Way to Spirituality (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005); Stef Aupers and Dick Houtman, ‘‘Beyond the Spiritual Supermarket: The Social and Public Significance of New Age Spirituality,’’ Journal of Contemporary Religion 21, no. 2 (2006): 201–22. 2. Such debates echo what has become known as the Materialismusstreit in nineteenth-century Germany. The polemical debate between zoologist Carl Vogt, who defended a materialist worldview that strictly relied on the natural sciences, and physiologist Rudolf Wagner, who insisted that the natural sciences had nothing to say about the existence of God, shaped public discussions about the consequences of increased scientific knowledge starting in the 1840s. The rather simplistic opposition between matter and ideas was transcended by dialectical materialism. Nonetheless, this opposition has continued to shape public opinion up to our time, as, for instance, the antireligious polemics of Richard Dawkins and pro-atheist campaigns show. Recent research on the brain, e.g., the question of a ‘‘religion gene,’’ is also often mobilized in this framework. 3. Edward B. Tylor, Primitive Culture, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (1873; New York: Brentano’s, 1924). See also Talal Asad’s famous critique of Geertz’s definition of religion in terms of ‘‘belief’’: Clifford Geertz, ‘‘Religion as a Cultural System,’’ in The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 87–125; Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 27–54. See also Rodney Needham, Belief, Language, and Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). 4. Although within Christian discourse the terms belief and faith are used interchangeably, faith is more intimately and exclusively connected to Protestant religiosity than belief, which is also used in a general sense, as a host of definitions of religion show, from Tylor to Clifford Geertz. On the distinction between faith and belief, see W. C. Smith, Faith and Belief (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1979). See also David Morgan, ‘‘Introduction: The Matter of Belief,’’ in Religion and Material Culture: The Matter of Belief, ed. David Morgan (New York: Routledge, 2010), 2–3. 3 93 NOTE S TO PAGE S 2–4 5. See Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), and Donald S. Lopez, Jr., ‘‘Belief,’’ in Critical Terms for Religious Studies, ed. Mark C. Taylor (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 21–35. 6. Lopez, ‘‘Belief,’’ 33. 7. See, e.g. José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); José Casanova, ‘‘Religion, European Secular Identities, and European Integration ,’’ www.eurozine.com, 29–7-2004; and José Casanova, ‘‘Public Religions Revisited,’’ in Religion, ed. de Vries, 101–19. On modern religion as essentially privatized religion, see esp. Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (New York: Macmillan, 1967). 8. See: Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a PostSecular World (New York: Fordham, 2007), esp. Jürgen Habermas, ‘‘On the Relation Between the Secular Liberal State and Religion,’’ 251–60 (also in The Frankfurt School on Religion: Key Writings by the Major Thinkers, ed. Eduardo Mendieta [New York: Routledge, 2005], 327–38); Charles Taylor , A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Peter Achterberg, Dick Houtman, et al., ‘‘A Christian Cancellation of the Secularist Truce? Waning Christian Religiosity and Waxing...