Lived religion as an emerging field: an assessment of its contours and frontiers

Over the last three decades, lived religion has emerged as a distinct field of study, with an identifiable “canon” of originating sources. With this body of work reaching maturity, a critical assessment is in order. This study analyzes sixty-four journal articles published in English, since 1997, which have used either “lived religion” or “everyday religion” in their titles, abstracts, or keywords. We find that the field has largely been defined by what it excludes. It includes attention to laity, not clergy or elites; to practices rather than beliefs; to practices outside religious institutions rather than inside; and to individual agency and autonomy rather than collectivities or traditions. Substantively, the focus on practice has encompassed dimensions of embodiment, discourse and materiality; and I argue here that these substantive foci can form the analytical structure for expanding the domain of lived religion to include the traditions and institutions that have so far largely been excluded from study. In doing so, lived religion’s attention to gender, power, and previously-excluded voices must be maintained. But that task cannot be accomplished without continuing to expand the field beyond the still-limited geographic and religious terrain it has so far covered

When lived ancient religion and lived ancient medicine meet: the household Gods, the household shrine and regimen

This paper argues that there was a strong connection between Roman domestic religious belief and practice and Roman domestic medical practice through the association of the household gods with the household’s health and well-being. It examines six examples of household shrines from Pompeii and the surrounding area to explore how specific non-elite households utilised their personal private religious beliefs and practices in the service of maintaining the health and well-being of their members. These six household shrines take the form of paintings that depict the household gods in conjunction with specific types of foodstuffs, and these foodstuffs are ones which played an important role in Roman regimen

Resource Use Decisions: A Framework for Studying Religion and Sustainable Environments

Analyses of everyday religion and sustainable environments in the Himalaya are not helped much by the blunt instruments of “world religions” approaches to religion and ecology. This article suggests that a better grounded understanding, especially helpful for policy-makers integrating case studies from widely varying regions, might be gained by bypassing debates about the nature of “religion” entirely. Inspired by discussions in the Everyday Religion and Sustainable Environments project, this article proposes a research framework with the deliberately mundane name resource use decisions. Attending to the reasons given, in various settings and to various stakeholders, for decisions regarding the cultivation and use of resources will take us beyond unreflectively secular understandings of these terms, as well as beyond reified understandings of “other-worldly” religion which exist more in the texts of scholars than in the everyday worlds where religion lives. Consonant with the recent turn to “lived religion,” resource use decisions draws attention to the religious creativity of agents at every level, lay, specialist and even other-than-human, and to the categories they employ in navigating and sustaining religious worlds. This approach better suits the ecologically, culturally and politically varied and changing Himalayan region, but also suggests ways in which Himalayan studies can contribute to broader reflection on the nature of religious practices and traditions in a pluralizing, globalizing and environmentally changing world

Enemy at the gate? Models of response to contemporary religious plurality

Ours is age of plurality in all things. Yet, plurality has always been the case: difference, diversity, multiplicity – that which tends to disconnectedness in whatever sphere of human life – has ever been the lot of humanity. Religion is no exception. Yet while most religions would hold that unity – the uniformity and coherence suggestive of an inherent connectedness – is a sine qua non, the lived reality of religious people everywhere is often the context of, and contention with, a disconnectedness which is consequent upon difference of viewpoint, variety of experience, clash of interpretation, and competing claims for religious allegiance and identity. This can be the case both within any one major religious tradition as well as between them. Given the ubiquitous nature of religion and the pressing need for improved interreligious relations in many parts of the world, the question of how the fact of religious plurality is apprehended from within the religions themselves is critical. Naturally every religion proffers its own hermeneutic of the religiously ‘other’. Typically, this has included variations on the themes of exclusivity and inclusiveness

The Theological Misappropriation of Christianity as a Civilizing Force

The theological misappropriation of Christianity as a civilizing force occurs when individuals convert to Christianity due to deception that ignores the faith-based aspect of Christianity. The history of Western education in India illustrates the hidden curriculum that Christian missionaries employed to disrupt the Indian educational system. This unnerving pedagogy points to the need for a postcolonial theoretical framework that relates the inescapable hybridity of religion and culture where Orientalism has the potential to occur. To press the ongoing urgency of this discussion, I convey how the history of British India connects to my lived-reality as an American Hindu. Overall, I point to hybridity as a lived paradox of ambiguous conflict that embraces interfaith relations. I offer implications for Christian missionaries today to foster authentic interfaith connections without engaging in colonizing ideologies

Book Review: The Responsive Self: Personal Religion in Biblical Literature of the Neo-Babylonian and Persian Periods

In this short, engaging, and learned book, Susan Niditch takes readers into the world of sixth–fifth century BCE Judah/Yehud to understand what it might have meant for religion during this period to have become “personal.” Books like Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Job, Ecclesiastes, Psalms, Proverbs, and Zechariah, among others, take center stage as examples of the turn toward the individual’s relationship to God and the personal psychology of discrete actors in the process of figuring out their place in the world. Though biblical scholars have often correctly emphasized the “group identity” of ancient Israelites, rallying around symbols like temple, land, and king, the era under Niditch’s focus saw many fascinating expressions of a singular person, a “self” in the making, forging an autobiographical relationship to the deity. Not limited purely to biblical texts, Niditch illuminates this phenomenon through the sociological study of religion as well as archaeology. Her simple but convincing argument is that during the exilic and post-exilic periods in Israel authors turned toward complex descriptions of the self, and in doing so ushered in a new period in which religiously creative expressions of personality entered the world of “lived religion” as never before

Lived religion in a plural society: a resource or liability

Recently there is a renewed academic interest in religion bringing it back on the global political agenda. Religion in the post modern global order is fast emerging as a new organizing principle in the face of multi-polarity, trans-nationality and sweeping pluralisation of peoples. Contrary to the secularist self believe, the modern has failed to take over the tradition including religion. Rather a logical opposite seems to be happening, questioning the very presumptions of the modernity project. The present paper is a narrative on this creative tension in the religious modern and post modern. The paper is crafted into four sections. First section seeks to pin down the genesis of “religious” in the search for social order and consciousness beyond the material world. Second section deals with the unfolding of enlightenment project and its manifest consequence with the birth of secularism master theory. Third section delves deep into the immediate Indian religious lived experiences under foreign rule up to the sweeping spell of globalisation. Fourth and last part of the essay makes a case for universality of a multicultural world and religious secularism