Conversations: An Online Journal of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion

A remarkable reliquary helps us imagine new possibilities around the earliest English settlement in North America.

An ethnically and religiously diverse spiritual community near Philadelphia founded by a Tamil teacher from Sri Lanka.

The role material culture has played in the introduction of non-Christian forms of spirituality into the United States as examined through Sufi art.

Why did the Inca approach metal so differently from other sculptural media, most notably stone?

If the land “was Mexican once and Indian always,” migrants are not outsiders or “illegals.” They—we—belong to the land.

A follower of Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, Green is based in Pennsylvania and is best known for his illustrations in The Illuminated Rumi (1997).

With the Spanish invasion and colonization of Peru in the 1530s, the visual arts played an integral role in the religious indoctrination of indigenous and Afro-descendant communities to Catholicism. Mural painting in particular became a favored medium in early evangelization efforts because of its relatively low cost and shorter execution time in comparison to multimedia pieces such as retablos (altarpieces) and polychrome sculptures.

What does a virtual meditation cushion tell us about material and visual cultures of religion?

The power to protect against “nature” now dwells in the human scientific-technological skills mastered by a certain culture, whose prowess enables it to discover these new (meta)physical angels and harness their powers.

The cultural politics of space has to do not simply with space itself, but with how it is occupied, enacted, performed, and marked—and sometimes, in Hawaiʻi and elsewhere, at least apparently unmarked.

Ex-votos at the Shrine of St. Roch occupy a complex place within conceptions of New Orleans as the subject of Protestant fascination with exoticized material aspects of Catholic practice.

While most Renaissance and Baroque engravings, etchings, and woodcuts were printed on paper, some extraordinary impressions were produced on silk or linen. Contact relics provided a devotional inspiration for the most evocative of these prints on fabric.

The carte-de-visite of Maximilian von Habsburg’s shirt satisfied a sensational interest in the political event and served as a mourning object, offering the living both visual and tactile connections to the deceased to aid in the grieving process.

Produced in a Christian tradition for the viewing pleasure of the London art world's cultured audiences, William Quiller Orchardson’s The Story of a Life alludes to the controversies and contentions of religious life and women’s roles in mid-nineteenth-century Britain.

A Collection of chalkware from the Material Objects Archive

The eruv boundary marks the borders of imagined courtyards. It is a work of architecture and urban planning whose program is the neighborhood, and whose materials are the appropriated accumulations of urban life. It is also a work of art whose simple line surrounds and defines the complexity of urban space while it defines the complex human community that inhabits its space.

Eikonostasia (Greek: εικονοστάσια, singular: eikonostasi, literally: “icon stand”) are a constant if understated part of Greek urban and rural landscape.

Utah artist George Martin Ottinger painted Aztec Maiden during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, when numerous theories proliferated about the history and origins of indigenous American civilizations.

What does it mean to hold onto evidentiary objects, ordinary objects that may never make it to court, the evidence from the vast majority of crimes that remain otherwise unresolved, including so many of the horrific crimes that constitute the Holocaust?

The French Republic's July 1793 exhumation of the royal tombs intertwines not only contemporary religion and politics but also religious traditions with contemporary intellectual debate.

Material objects, including a group of documentary paintings of Our Lady of Cocharcas, recall the processes by which ancient Andean pilgrimage traditions became deeply integrated into late-colonial socio-religious consciousness.

What is the meaning of the word "spirit" in Africa?

The old Islamic Center of Murfreesboro was not, it seems, meant to be seen at all. A yearning to blend in, be ordinary, unremarkable, even overlooked, would, as I later discovered, inflect the architectural presentiments of the old and new centers alike, and provide an apt metaphor for the struggles that have confronted the Islamic community in this small city in central Tennessee.

Consumption as a material practice changes religious meanings and practices, and value comes to be invested in certain religious objects, rituals, and ideas rather than others.