The making of faith: human intentions and material influences in the orthodox christian practice of iconography

Abstract

American Protestants participate in Eastern Orthodox iconography workshops and use icons. What do these practices and objects mean to the practitioners and how do these meanings materialize? This article answers these questions by demonstrating how participants in the workshops consciously utilized their previous religious and secular knowledge to understand their experience of creating and engaging with icons, and how these practices, at the same time, influenced these practitioners to imagine new understandings of and adopt new uses for these sacred objects. Demonstrating how Protestants who made icons treated them primarily as objects that help to express personal religious agency, and how, on the other hand, icons opened up a space for these practitioners to embrace them as lively presences, this article insists that religion is as much about human intentions as material influences of objects.