MAVCOR Journal

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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).

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.

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?