MAVCOR announces the expansion of its website with the launch of the second phase of the project. This expansion highlights new forums for sharing ideas and scholarship on material and visual cultures of religion. MAVCOR assembles here a range of Conversations under a number of headings: Essays, Object Narratives, Medium Studies, Constellations, and Interviews. These Conversations are complemented by a Material Objects Archive, an ever-expanding online gallery of objects, images, and materialities.

MAVCOR is pleased to announce the formation of our distinguished Editorial Board for peer review of MAVCOR content. The Editorial Board comprises experts in disciplines related to MAVCOR's work, including history of art, religious studies, and anthropology, and in specializations covering a wide geographical and chronological sweep as well as numerous religious traditions. For further information about the Editorial Board and biographies of its members, see the Editorial Board page.

MAVCOR is pleased to announce the publication of Sensational Religion: Sensory Cultures in Material Practice. The result of a collaborative, multiyear project, this groundbreaking book investigates the dynamic constellation of religion, sensation, and materality, exploring the interpretive worlds of sensory phenomena in material practices of religion.

Moving beyond familiar tropes of the social gospel and the modernist impulse, this conference explores the history and theory of American Religious Liberalism in its various social, material, political, and disciplinary contexts. In what ways, and to what effects, have the categories of “religion” and “liberalism” been conceived in the United States and over time? Through what material and artistic media were concepts and cultures of American religious liberalism developed?

A scholarly panel will examine, contextualize, and historicize underlying assumptions about space and belonging with respect to Islam in the United States.

David C. Driskell was born in Eatonton, Georgia, in 1931. Educated in the public schools of North Carolina, he received his undergraduate degree in art at Howard University and a Master of Fine Arts degree from the Catholic University of America, both in Washington, D.C. He pursued post-graduate study in Art History at The Netherlands Institute for the History of Art in the Hague and has studied, on four continents, the subjects of African and African American cultures. He has been awarded 12 honorary doctoral degrees in art.

Jonathan D. Katz, State University of New York at Buffalo, Department of Visual Studies

David Chidester, Department of Religious Studies, University of Cape Town

Margaretta Lovell, Department of History of Art, University of California--Berkeley

Susan Ashbrook Harvey, Department of Religious Studies, Brown University