Christianity and the Material, Medieval to Modern

Abstract

Quite recently it was said that the humanities and social sciences had taken a “linguistic turn.” Today a “material turn” has taken place, perhaps in reaction to the ruling post-structuralism of the 1980s and 1990s, or as an extension of post-modern approaches. The dangers posed by human-induced climate change and the success of cognitive-scientific subdisciplines that address consciousness, social interaction, and communication run parallel to “new materialists” across numerous disciplines in the humanities and social sciences (archeologists, anthropologists, and historians of art, architecture, science, and religion) intent on turning an earlier anthropocentrism on its head. These new materialists experiment with sometimes extreme views of material agency, even while they examine symbolic systems in past and present, thus approaching “culture” as “human behavioral ecology” or pursuing “cognitive archeology” – with methods that presuppose the physical co-dependence of human reflection, things, and environments. But can or should the symbolic content of a culture be treated as a material thing?