Provocations

How might we make American religion more capacious? What sources—ethnographic, material, sensory, and historical—can provoke new narratives, stories, and documentation of religion in the Americas? What are the procedures and rituals of accessing and analyzing those sources? How is finding, reading, and creatively or affectively engaging with sources part of the research process?

In this space we spotlight sources and provocations that enrich and challenge how and where we find, narrate, and study religious lives, spaces, imaginaries, and communities. We feature emerging field sites, findings from new or ignored archives, archives that give a global or hemispheric shape to American religion, object histories, and reflections on the sensory, bodily, visual, and material religion.

American Religion is methodologically eclectic. The stuff of:

Bureaucratic record keeping
Objects both efficacious and decorative
Foodstuffs and preparation processes
Built environments
Monuments
Infrastructures
Maps & Geographies
Clothing & Skin
Sound
Kinesthetics & Touch
Art & Visual Culture
Transatlantic exchanges and the media which enable those exchanges

We invite scholars across disciplines and time periods to offer provocations, source spotlights, methodological reflections and directions for the future of American religion. Where might we look or to dismantle the privileging of visual dimensions of religion, what might we smell, touch, taste? What stories can we tell? Who and what might we include in the study of religion in the Americas? How might we tell stories of mobility and migration? What new archives might we “open”?

American Religion 9/27/21 American Religion 9/27/21

The American Bishops

American Religion 8/27/21 American Religion 8/27/21

The Pornography of the Capitol Putsch

American Religion 6/28/21 American Religion 6/28/21

Are Dogs Part of America’s Civil Religion?

American Religion 10/7/20 American Religion 10/7/20

Teaching Religion, 1955

American Religion 8/25/20 American Religion 8/25/20

Woke Up Wanting to See the World Burn Down

American Religion 7/27/20 American Religion 7/27/20

French King, Catholic Saint, American Icon: Provoking Religion, Race, and Public Memory in an American City

American Religion 4/28/20 American Religion 4/28/20

God’s Home in a Walk-in Closet

American Religion 12/12/19 American Religion 12/12/19

Like-able Me, Like-able There

American Religion 10/14/19 American Religion 10/14/19

Unsingular Subjects

American Religion 9/5/19 American Religion 9/5/19

Slavery’s Cohabitation and the Marriage Crisis in 19th Century Haiti

American Religion 9/4/19 American Religion 9/4/19

Tattoos as Sacramentals

CURATOR, 2019 - 2021

Alyssa Maldonado-Estrada is Assistant Professor of Religion at Kalamazoo College, and received her PhD from Princeton University. She is an ethnographer specializing in Religion in the Americas, with a focus on masculinity, Catholicism, material culture, and urban religion. Her forthcoming book Lifeblood of the Parish: Men and Catholic Practice in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, is an ethnographic study that examines the religious and devotional lives of Catholic men. It explores how the parish is a vital site for the making of masculinities and how devotional traditions—and the very materiality and labor essential to their making—structure mens’ pursuit and achievement of manhood. Follow her on Twitter here.