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

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.