MAVCOR Journal

MAVCOR Journal is an open access born-digital, double blind peer-reviewed journal dedicated to promoting conversation about material and visual cultures of religion. Published by the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion at Yale University and reviewed by members of our distinguished Editorial Board and other experts, MAVCOR Journal encourages contributors to think deeply about the objects, performances, sounds, and digital experiences that have framed and continue to frame human engagement with religion broadly understood across diverse cultures, regions, traditions, and historical periods.

Volume 4: Issue 1
Object Narratives Fernando Brito and Héctor Parra, Judío Didier Aubert

In Judío, photographer Fernando Brito attempts to find an ad-hoc visual representation for the Yoremem or Mayo Indians in his native state of Sinaloa, Mexico. This portrait pays tribute to the foundational value of the community’s ritual, which combines indigenous cosmology with seventeenth-century Jesuit influence, as crucial to its survival and cohesion.

Object Narratives A Dying House in Samarkand’s Jewish Neighborhood Alanna E. Cooper

Pagiel Leviyev’s house is very sick. Built in Samarkand over a century ago, the structure was designed as a mansion for a wealthy mercantile family. Today, it stands as a crumbling reminder of the Jewish community’s long and complex history in this unexpected spot of the world.

Volume 3: Issue 2 Material and Visual Cultures of Religion in the American South

This special joint issue is published with The Journal of Southern Religion (JSR). The journals issued a call for papers together in 2017 and are pleased to publish these four peer-reviewed articles, two editorial introductions, and one editorial reflection. In his editorial reflection, Bill Ferris considers his own history with southern religion and material culture. Jason Young and Louis P. Nelson offer introductions for the four articles, with additional reflection on the state of the field.

Mediations Material and Visual Cultures of Religion in the American South William R. Ferris

Described by Flannery O’Connor as “Christ-haunted,” southern identity is and always has been shaped by religion. The still familiar sight of churches and hand-painted religious signs along highways and roads are powerful reminders of religion throughout the region. As the field of Southern Studies has evolved, so has our understanding of religion and its expression in material and visual culture in the region.

Mediations Critical Reflections on Visual and Material Religion Louis P. Nelson

This joint edition of MAVCOR Journal and the Journal of Southern Religion has focused needed attention on the ways that visual and material cultures have played and continue to play a critical role in shaping religious belief and practice in the American South. The very kind offer by the editors to write an editorial introduction to the edition encouraged me to reflect a bit more deeply on the trajectories of recent scholarship and some of the holes I see in the current historiography.

Mediations On the Religion of Things Jason R. Young

Though often perceived as an arena of human life devoted exclusively to the ethereal, the actual practice of religion, not to mention our study of it, is mediated through the material circumstances of life.

Constellations The Second Great Awakening and the Built Landscape of Missouri Samuel Stella

The simple, gable-end church form was suited to the material circumstances and to the socio-theological climate of the Second Great Awakening. Gable-end churches provided an affective and sensorial locus for newly created communities to position themselves as extensions of an evangelical Protestant national consciousness.

Essays “A Doorkeeper in the House of My God”: Female Stewardship of Protestant Sacred Spaces in the Gulf South, 1830-1861 Emily H. Wright

The movement to build and furnish new churches in the Antebellum South was not the moment of Protestant women’s religious domestication, but rather an opportunity for a new type of public stewardship of the church, one that encouraged female collective action. Women expressed their piety and leadership in the church by enhancing its materiality, they gave their churches permanence and social status.

Essays Horseshoe Crosses and Muddy Boots: Material Culture and Rural Masculinity in Cowboy Churches Sarah "Moxy" Moczygemba

In a large pasture in West Texas, thirty-five men and women sit mounted on horseback and forty more stand around them. Sitting astride a horse in front of them is their pastor, next to another man holding a large American flag. He reads to them from the Bible of the wondrous changes brought by the Lord and then invites them to church the next day. With this simple invocation, the pasture roping at the local cowboy church is now underway.

Essays Uncle Tom’s Bibles: Bibles as Visual and Material Objects from Antebellum Abolitionism to Jim Crow Cinema Edward J. Blum

Stowe’s deployments of bibles and artistic representations of them in illustrated editions offered a conservative abolitionism that emphasized the potential for peace among former slaves and masters. . . . bibles in the afterlives of Uncle Tom’s Cabin continued to offer moderation when it came to issues of race and racial interactions.

Volume 3: Issue 1
Essays Audible Paintings: Religious Music and Devotion to the Infancy of Christ in the Art of the Viceroyalty of Peru Carolina Sacristán-Ramírez

Paintings are silent, but not to those who know how to listen. Some paintings appeal to the sense of hearing in order to stimulate the beholder’s emotional engagement. For eighteenth-century nuns living in the Viceroyalty of Peru, paintings could evoke Latin polyphony or villancicos, songs in the vernacular performed in sacred contexts.

Collections Modern Art in Egypt and Constellational Modernism: A New Approach to Global Modern Art Alex Dika Seggerman

To challenge the problematic narratives of modernity, perpetuated by both traditional and emergent approaches to modernism, Egyptian modern art should be analyzed through a new paradigm called, “constellational modernism.”

Mediations Trump’s Wall: A Monument of (Un)Civil Religion? Lloyd Barba

Trump has relentlessly pushed for a “monument” that cannot be torn down or simply relocated: the wall.

Constellations Adobe and Stone Churches of New Mexico: A Selection Frank Graziano

The architecture of New Mexican village churches is often described as vernacular, which is to say that the construction materials (adobe, stone, vigas, latillas) are local; the design reflects local taste, tradition, and resources; the construction standards are idiosyncratic, pursuant to the experience, inclinations, and skills of the builders; and the finished product represents the history and cultural identity of the community.

Volume 2: Issue 1
Essays Elijah Pierce and Material Conversions Sally M. Promey

Obey God and Live (Vision of Heaven) is Elijah Pierce’s personal conversion narrative. In this piece of wood he depicted the definitive episode of his own spiritual autobiography, an event in his past that he understood to (re)organize, interpret, and frame his entire life.

Constellations Street Altars in Mexico City Esther Kersley

This series of images, taken over the course of six months, documents the street altars dotted around Mexico’s dense, urbanized capital, home to over twenty-one million people.

Object Narratives Miki Kratsman, Diptych from The Resolution of the Suspect Laura S. Levitt

In The Resolution of the Suspect, photographer Miki Kratsman builds on the reliquary nature and the transitive qualities of the carte-de-visite, creating a diptych: the historic image on one page of the centerfold and his own photograph of the bloody garment of a single unnamed Palestinian martyr on the other.

Object Narratives Georgia O’Keeffe, Black Cross with Stars and Blue Jeffrey Richmond-Moll

In 1929, on her first visit to New Mexico, the American artist Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) observed the animate potential of the region’s religious material culture.

Volume 1: Issue 1
Essays The Canopy Tomb of Edward Shippen Burd Suzanne Glover Lindsay

This American monument may even present an understudied alternative vision of the afterlife—one incorporating an intermediate phase just after death—that runs through nineteenth-century Protestant and Anglo-Episcopal sources.

Conversations Reconstructing the Faces of the Saints, an Interview with Friar Luis Enrique Ramírez Camacho, O. P. Interviewed by Emily C. Floyd

In 2014 the Dominican Order in Peru worked with Brazilian NGO EBRAFOL to produce digital facial reconstructions of Peruvian saints Rose of Lima, Martin of Porres, and John Macías.

Conversations Nruhari Das on Material Culture and Krishna Consciousness Interviewed by Ashley Makar

Ashley Makar interviewed Nruhari Das on September 22, 2012 at the Sri Sri Radha Govinda Mandir ISKON Hare Krisha Temple in Brooklyn, New York.

Conversations Shep Parson on Material Culture and Protestant Ministry Interviewed by Ashley Makar

Ashley Makar interviewed Shephard (Shep) Parsons in 2011 when Parsons was minister at Shelton Congregational Church in Shelton, Connecticut. He is currently Senior Pastor at First Church of Christ, Woodbridge, Connecticut.

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

MAVCOR began publishing Conversations: An Online Journal of the Center for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion in 2014. In 2017 we selected a new name, MAVCOR Journal. Articles published prior to 2017 are considered part of Conversations and are listed as such under Volumes in the MAVCOR Journal menu.

Essays Jamestown’s Relics: Sacred Presence in the English New World Christopher M. B. Allison

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

Object Narratives An American Sufi Shrine, Bawa’s Mazar in Coatesville, Pennsylvania M. Shobhana Xavier

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

Object Narratives From Illuminated Rumi to the Green Barn: The Art of Sufism in America M. Shobhana Xavier

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

Medium Studies Tears of the Sun: The Naturalistic and Anthropomorphic in Inca Metalwork Emily C. Floyd

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

Mediations Making Crosses, Crossing Borders: The Performance of Mourning, the Power of Ghosts, and the Politics of Countermemory in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands Barbara Sostaita

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

Conversations Interview with American Sufi Artist Michael Green Interviewed by M. Shobhana Xavier

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

Object Narratives Virtual Meditation Cushion (Zafu) Gregory Price Grieve

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

Essays Julian Voss-Andreae, Angel of the West Jonathan Schorsch

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.

Mediations Material Establishment and Public Display Sally M. Promey

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.

Object Narratives Ex-Votos, Shrine of St. Roch, New Orleans Stephanie Bilinksy

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.

Medium Studies Printing the Body of Christ on Fabric Suzanne Karr Schmidt

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.

Object Narratives Carte-de-visite Photograph of Maximilian von Habsburg’s Execution Shirt Eleanor A. Laughlin

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.

Essays Fabric of Devotion: William Quiller Orchardson’s The Story of a Life and Women Religious in Victorian Britain Ayla Lepine

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.

Object Narratives George Martin Ottinger, Aztec Maiden Breanne Robertson

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.

Mediations Revisiting the Property Room: A Humanist Perspective on Doing Justice and Telling Stories Laura S. Levitt

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?

Essays The Revolutionary Exhumations at St-Denis, 1793 Suzanne Glover Lindsay

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.

Object Narratives Our Lady of Cocharcas Emily Engel

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.

Object Narratives Mask with Superstructure Representing a Beautiful Mother (D'mba) Frederick John Lamp

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

Essays The Politics of (Mere) Presence: The Islamic Center of Murfreesboro, Tennessee Guy Jordan

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.

Essays Praying through the senses: The Prayer Rug/Carpet and the Converging Territories of the Material and the Spiritual Minoo Moallem

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.

Conversations Imam Shamsi Ali: Thoughts on Islam and Material Culture Interviewed by Ashley Makar

Imam Shamsi Ali is an Islamic scholar, Chairman of the Al-Hikmah Mosque in Astoria, and the Director of Jamaica Muslim Center in Queens.

Conversations Reverend Alex Dyer: Tradition and Innovation in the Episcopal Church Interviewed by Ashley Makar

Ashley Makar interviewed Reverend Alex Dyer, priest-in-charge of St. Paul and St. James Episcopal Church of New Haven, CT in May 2011.

Essays Martin Puryear, Desire Bryan Wolf

The world of handmade objects and manual labor turns strange in Puryear's Desire, and in this way, the ordinary becomes—here is list of options, choose one—estranged, uncanny, defamiliarized.

Object Narratives William Vander Weyde, Leon F. Czolgosz, McKinley Assassin Lindsay Reckson

Early debates around the use of the electric chair pivoted on the convergence of state and divine power.

Object Narratives The Balvanera Escudo Cristina Cruz González

Nun's badges worn in colonial New Spain not only articulated a woman’s religious affiliations, family fortune, and ethnic purity but also expressed her desire to influence political opinion.

Object Narratives Adonai/Adidas T-Shirt Anne Grant

The t-shirt’s appropriation of a multinational sportswear corporation’s logo into a sacred Hebrew name for God could be simply a clever play on words, but a more critical approach might take into account the commodification of this sacred name for the deity and its subsequent selling in the marketplace for profit.

Conversations Julie Dickerson: Creative Currents Interviewed by Ashley Makar

Ashley Makar interviewed Julie Dickerson in 2010 while she was painting a mural of “dancing saints”—ranging from Moses’ sister Miriam to Martin Luther King—in the undercroft at St. James and St. Paul Episcopal Church in New Haven, Connecticut (affectionately nicknamed “St. PJ's”).

Object Narratives C. C. A. Christensen, Joseph Preaching to the Indians Nathan Rees

Although LDS doctrine esteemed Native Americans as literal descendants of the peoples of the Book of Mormon, relations between Mormons and Indians in Utah grew increasingly strained as resources became scarce. Christensen’s work reflects this divided perspective.

Object Narratives Portable Altar of Countess Gertrude Crispin Paine

The portable altar seems to have developed in the missionary world of the seventh century, to meet the Church's requirement that Mass be celebrated only on a consecrated altar—a requirement that strengthened the position of bishops, who alone could consecrate them.

Object Narratives Thomas Eakins, The Crucifixion Akela Reason

In his 1880 The Crucifixion, Thomas Eakins, a reputed agnostic, crafted a realist interpretation of one of the central devotional subjects in Christian art, challenging the traditional iconography of the crucifixion by eliminating all signs of divine presence.

Object Narratives Gordon Parks, Dresser in the bedroom of Mrs. Ella Watson, a government charwoman Sally M. Promey

Visibly claiming to regulate the prescribed Christian imitation of the biblical figures they represented, late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century statues of light-complexioned religious figures populated domestic spaces, churches, and missions fields, and implied that looking like Jesus or Mary or John might be more “natural” or “complete” for some than for others.

Essays Art That Breathes: Lewis deSoto’s Paranirvana (self-portrait) Anya Montiel

Unlike its solid stone predecessor, deSoto’s work, made from painted polyethylene cloth, is hollow, filled only by air from a fan that keeps the sculpture inflated. The resemblance to the reclining Buddha is nonetheless remarkable, from the curls of hair to the folds of the robe, the one exception being that deSoto superimposed his own facial features, complete with goatee, on this Buddha.

Medium Studies Chalkware, Plaster, Plaster of Paris Sally M. Promey

In the second half of the nineteenth century, in Europe and the United States, chalkware accomplished for three-dimensional devotional objects what chromolithography managed for images in two dimensions.

Object Narratives James Latimer Allen, Madonna and Child Camara Dia Holloway

During the Harlem Renaissance, mother and child portraits and figure studies were especially popular in the African American media, signaling the importance placed on motherhood and the nurturing of future generations.

Conversations Aparajita Guha: Conversation about Contemporary Hindu Spiritual Practice Interviewed by Ashley Makar

This conversation about spirituality happened in the home of Aparajita Guha in Rexford, New York, on June 20, 2012. Guha, a practicing Hindu, is a family friend of Ashley Makar, who is a practicing Christian.

Constellations Viaticum, Last Rites Cabinet, Sick Call Set Sally M. Promey

Among the material items that might occupy the pre-Vatican II American Catholic home, regardless for the most part of the occupant’s ethnicity or familial nation of origin, the last rites cabinet or viaticum (Latin for “supply of provisions for a journey”) asserted a powerful daily and nightly presence.

Object Narratives Mark Rothko, No. 5/No. 22 Andrea Pappas

Strong, gestural markings in the central red band distinguish this painting from Rothko’s other mature works. This anomaly consists of long, gently undulating lines formed by gouging the surface of the paint all the way to the canvas before it dried. Straining out from a central point, the horizontal lines contrast sharply with the fuzzy, indeterminate edges of the other elements of the painting.

Object Narratives Ford Madox Brown, Work Tim Barringer

Ford Madox Brown’s allegory of labor in all its forms is the most ambitious Pre-Raphaelite painting of modern life and a profound meditation on the relationship between art, religion, and labor in Victorian society.

Object Narratives Bertel Thorvaldsen, Christus (Christ) Petra ten-Doesschate Chu and Peter Ahr

The internationally famous Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1789–1838) was asked to produce a series of colossal statues of Christ, John the Baptist, and the apostles for the new Neoclassical Vor Frue Kirke of Denmark. Of these, Christus (Christ) has become best-known. Copies of the sculpture, often true to size or even larger, can be found around the world.

Conversations Rabbi Jordie Gerson: Reflections on Images and Jewish Traditions Interviewed by Ashley Makar

Ashley Makar spoke with Rabbi Jordie Gerson on October 26, 2010 at Yale University’s Joseph Slifka Center for Jewish Life. Rabbi Jordie Gerson currently works as the Assistant Director and Campus Rabbi at University of Vermont Hillel.

Object Narratives Barquitos del San Juan: La Revista de los Niños, Year 13, No. 23, 2007 Kristin Schwain

Rolando Estévez Jordán, a visual artist, and Alfredo Zaldívar, a poet, co-founded Cuba’s Ediciones Vigía (Watchtower Editions) in 1985 to create an open forum for writers, musicians, and artists.

Object Narratives Carte de visite Photograph Album Rachel McBride Lindsey

What photograph albums teach us about nineteenth-century viewing habits is that the reach of religion extended beyond compositionally “religious” subjects. Modes of beholding were often forms of religious practice that did not require a regulated rift between sacred and secular.