The theme for our upcoming first issue

Objects are material, but they can be more than “mere” physical entities. They are imbued with meaning, purpose and agency. From everyday items to sacred artifacts and ritual tools, the theme “objects” offers the opportunity to explore their role in shaping, expressing, sustaining, and playing out religious practices, beliefs, identities, and expressions.

Studying objects in religious studies is important for understanding the material and embodied dimensions of religion(s). The focus on objects offers an insight into how the material shapes worship, mediate relations, and inform how the world is viewed. By studying these insights, scholars can deepen their understanding of religion(s), religiosities, and lived religion(s) through historical, cultural, and sensory dimensions. 

This theme and journal issue invites contributors to consider the dynamic interplay of objects across a wide range of contexts, both through theoretical and empirical works. We wish for contributors to expand on what an object, and materiality, can be in religion(s). It encourages approaches of understanding religion(s) and religious expressions through materiality. Approaches which illuminates the way in which objects function as an intersection between people, the world, and the other-than-human.

Examples of such endeavours are, but are not limited to:

• Objects as tools for worship
• Object in relation to communication and dialogue
• Objects as symbols of worship/devotion/sacred/identity, etc.
• Object as mediation with the other-than-human
• Objects as carriers of history/community/culture
• Objects as inhabiting agency
• Objects as aesthetic expressions of religion(s)
• Objects as part of the sensory experience of religion(s)
• Objects and their “cultural biographies”
• Objects and their broader material culture context