Religious Aesthetics Research Articles

Miracles of Technology and Art: Ancient Religious Aesthetics and Byzantine Iconoclasm

This article explores the role of technology in arousing religious awe from classical antiquity to the time of Emperor Theophilos. People’s fascination with technology ensured that this trend, increasingly popular in Greco-Roman religious festivals from the Hellenistic period onwards, gained pace among Christians after an initial period of rejecting pagan religious aesthetics. Technology was highly prised by both pagan and Christian rulers who typically sought to impress their subjects by displaying the technology available at their disposal. However, while the emperors’ reliance on technology to allude to divine favour was tolerated, technology employed to stage miracles or influence faith was deeply harmful for Christianity. Theophilos’ father is reported by Eutychius to have punished paradigmatically the mastermind of one such mechanically enabled miracle in his native Phrygia. Thus, Theophilos’ iconoclastic views as well as his known obsession with automata are explored as part of a longstanding debate on Christian religious aesthetics.

Alice and Alisa

This article compares the aesthetics of Wonderland in two animated adaptations of Lewis Carroll’s classic tale, examining Disney’s 1951 rendition and Kievnauchfilm’s 1981 adaptation. Through an analysis of animation techniques, art styles, and cultural influences, it explores how each production visually depicts Alice’s adventures. Disney’s approach is characterized by a grounded, simplified style, while Kievnauchfilm fully embraces the surrealism of Carroll’s text. The essay discusses how Disney’s use of photographic references results in a more realistic portrayal, albeit somewhat lacking the unrestrained nonsense of Carroll’s world, and contrasts it with Kievnauchfilm’s use of multiple art styles to capture Wonderland’s absurdity. It also considers the influence of market demands and religious aesthetics on the American and the Soviet adaptation respectively, and it explores the social and ideological ramifications of Eisenstein’s concept of “plasmaticness” in the animation of both films. Ultimately, this research provides insights into how cultural context shapes the aesthetics of visual storytelling.

The Reverberation of the Sacred Gurbani’s Vibrations at the Darbar Sahib: The Issue of Its Television Broadcasting

This essay will examine the contemporary issue of the television broadcasting of the sacred Gurbani from the Darbar Sahib to set the stage for understanding the historical context of the musical sessions (chauṅkīs) of devotional singing, followed by the process of decolonizing the musical performances in modern times, including religious aesthetics and sacred time and the processional chauṅkīs in the Darbar Sahib Complex. The continuous singing of the Guru’s hymns (Gurbani kirtan) resounds inside the Darbar Sahib (“the Divine Court”), popularly known as the Golden Temple of Amritsar. This special mode of worship consists of singing and listening to the hymns of the Guru Granth Sahib, the sacred scripture of the Sikhs. The heart of Sikh devotional experience lies in the performance of scriptural hymns in a congregational setting. Notably, different sessions of devotional singing go on day and night from 2.45 a.m. to 10.45 p.m. at the Golden Temple, following a celebrated tradition established more than four centuries ago by the Fifth Sikh Guru, Guru Arjan. Even during the four-hour period of cleaning the sanctum sanctorum at midnight, the devotees recite hymns from memory, thereby making the Darbar Sahib a unique place where vibrations of sacred sound reverberate continuously for twenty-four hours a day.

The influence of Russian religious aesthetics on Russian animation

Russian religious aesthetics, and in particular the canon of Orthodox iconography, had a huge impact on all spheres of Russian culture. Among these areas, the influence of religious aesthetics on Soviet animation in the mid-twentieth century has been studied least of all. The study is based on a comparative historical analysis, semiotic and discursive study of the visual text. The main purpose of the study is to highlight the actual immanent features of religious aesthetics in general and, in particular, to analyze Russian (Soviet) animation to identify the features inherent in traditional Orthodox iconography in it. Such immanent features were singled out based on a discursive-textual analysis of the works of the most prominent representatives of Russian religious aesthetics of the late 19th - first half of the twentieth century. The study of the visual text of the most famous animation works of the time under study made it possible to find in them features corresponding to the iconographic Orthodox canon and its strong influence both in formal features and in the philosophy of creativity of Soviet animators. The results of the study can become part of training courses on aesthetics, philosophy, history, animation and cinematography.

Performing Power in Nigeria: Identity, Politics, and Pentecostalism by Abimbola A. Adelakun

Power sits at the center of Adelakun’s rich analysis of Nigerian Pentecostalism. Its forms, functions, and influence weave throughout the book’s topics and themes. Adelakun argues that Nigeria’s social environment has been fundamentally transformed in recent decades by the way in which Pentecostals perform their identities as “people of power.” The book holds in tension two modes of power—the social construction of identity enacted by those in power (who seek to cohere and spread dominant narratives) and marginalized people’s demand for rights through radical performances (which raise counter-narratives about established norms). Adelakun demonstrates these competing spheres across an impressive succession of chapters, which use different sources to explore variable expressions of power and performance related to topics such as ethnic identity, gender expectation, fiscal legitimacy, comedy, familial identification, and COVID-19. The book shows how Pentecostals’ attention to, and discourses about, power have infused not only their community but also wider public spheres. The study provides more than insights into a religious group; it comments on the shape and animating forces at the heart of modern Nigerian society.Scholars looking for explicit discussion of interdisciplinary developments in studies of Pentecostalism or Nigeria will not find it in this book. In her introduction, Adelakun writes forcefully in support of performance studies as “the best methodology” for exploring features of religious aesthetics, actions, and politics (8). She positions her work primarily in relationship to recent intersections of religion and performance studies, generalizing other fields’ work on African Pentecostalism as missing the creative dimensions of religious life that shape production, reception, and ultimately identity construction. At odds with this seeming rejection of interdisciplinary framing, however, are the book’s chapters, which represent more dynamic, interdisciplinary cases than the introduction portends. In fact, despite Adelakun’s somewhat dismissive characterization of “anthropology, history, religious studies, and political science” in favor of performance studies (7), most of the book is fundamentally interdisciplinary. It reflects roots in African studies, a field that has brought together multiple disciplines since its beginning, often at the leading edge of methodological innovation.After the introduction, the book offers a multifaceted landscape in which a variety of sources and methods come into play. Adelakun analyzes a wide range of materials, from television dramas to financial campaigns, social-media movements to naming rituals drawing from interviews, ethnographic observations, visual analyses, and an array of media sources. For example, Chapter 3 explores expressions of the global #MeToo movement leveled against prominent Nigerian pastors. The case study brings together theological principles, gendered analysis of social respectability, visual analysis of social-media accounts, and discussion of the fetishized role of pastors’ images (literally posted on billboards or paraded on Instagram) as tools for fashioning power. Other chapters deal in nuanced ways with the democratic potential of internet communities, the role of comedy in producing worldviews, and ongoing interpretations of traditional practices, like naming.At its core, this book is not historical in focus. The first chapter with analysis lays out something of the history of Nigerian Pentecostalism, but it focuses more on exploring the role of theatrical activities in boosting congregants’ faith and commitment. The heart of Adelakun’s interest is clearly presentist. She is more interested in charting a discursive landscape than in exploring cause and effect or change over time. Similarly, her intellectual agenda is almost exclusively devoted to illuminating the contributions of performance studies to understanding the development and impact of Pentecostal identity in Nigeria. Readers interested in how she draws from other fields will need to go searching for them in her footnotes and text.Although Adelakun’s book does not immediately situate itself as a work of interdisciplinary history, those willing to engage with her chapters and content will find challenging material about the ways that attention to performance can deepen our analysis of historical problems.

After actuality: ideality and the promise of a purified religious vision in Frater Taciturnus

ABSTRACT This article engages Frater Taciturnus’s ‘Letter to the Reader’ to argue for a religious aesthetics in Kierkegaard. This religious aesthetics is designed to purify the passions and help the believer ‘see’ the religious ideal, but also to confront the aesthetic spectator with the religious reality of her own situation. My claim for this revised reading of religious poetics in Kierkegaard derives from Taciturnus’s view of a superior form of religious ideality that comes ‘after actuality’. This ideality is not an envisioned ideal that is untested by actuality and thus ‘illusory’ but an ideal that is graspable only after the self has acknowledged the actuality of their sinful condition, rather than any specific actual sin. To appreciate this form of ideality, Frater Taciturnus repeatedly resorts to visual metaphors and the power of imagination, suggesting that the religious ideal must be ‘seen’ with a sort of synoptic vision capable of looking past both comedy and tragedy and resulting in the purification of our typical affective responses to aesthetic objects. Seeing in this way, the individual imaginatively engages in religious aesthetics and grasps the religious ideality by affirming the actuality of their own sinfulness and receiving forgiveness for that sinfulness.

Aesthetics as Shared Interfaith Space between Christianity and Islam

AbstractDue to its immediate message, religious aesthetics is prone to various kinds of instrumentations in the contemporary world. In this context the aesthetic fundamentals shared by different religious traditions or scriptures must be rediscovered. This article argues for theological aesthetics as an effective category of analyzing religious identity and alterity. It looks at the aesthetics of revelation and scripture, and their reflexes in the embodied faith – architecture, ritual, and faith narratives – to articulate a comparative aesthetic theology of Christianity and Islam. The focus of this article lies in the interreligious potentialities of religious aesthetics, in the case of (Eastern) Christianity and Islam, conceived as a resonance chamber for similar sensibilities in the two religions.

THE IMAGO TEMPLI OF THE INVISIBLE CHURCH: IDEALISM AND ABSTRACT ART.

Two events, apparently distant one from the other and without any direct link between them, but nevertheless strictly connected by a common spiritual legacy, constitute the subject of this paper. The first one, took place in 1971, when a very special «ecumenical chapel» opened its doors to the public. It is known under the name of «Rothko Chapel», due to the general project, undertaken by the painter Mark Rothko. Since that time, it has become one of the most precious artworks that represent the contemporary religious aesthetics. The black Rothko’s paintings, the Greek-cross building designed by the architect Philip Johnson, the Broken Obelisk of the artist Barnett Newman standing right out of the Chapel and the music composed for this ambient by the composer Morton Feldman, have replaced what traditionally has been called an «imago templi»; but contrary to all Christian tradition they represent (literally) no-thing. The second event, took place in 1795, when two young friends, Hegel and Schelling, were making a kind of oath under the sign of an Invisible Church, actualizing an ambiguous concept that, even if rooted in the Holy Scriptures, it had been condemned for its consequences as heretical. The relationship between these two events is given by contemporary art historians which have established that modern abstract painting, from a formal point of view, is rooted in the Romantic tradition. With this paper I would like to contribute to the establishment of this connection, not only by formal means, but by showing a common spiritual attitude towards images. Christianity, essentially figurative in its religious aesthetics, has always had to deal with the Jewish prohibition of image-making. This difficulty has been inherited to contemporary debates in which artist with classical readings and education, often of Jewish origins but active in Christian societies, try to create a new kind of art, above all traditions and free of dogmas. According to my suggestion, Rothko Chapel should be considered as the realization of a fragile balance in which both «aniconism» and «need of images» have simultaneously sublated their one-sidedness, producing a higher spiritual stage. Thus, such a chapel would not be a simple space where all religions could only meet and undertake a dialog, but should be considered as something more surprising: a unique realization of what logically appears as a pure contradiction: the realization of an Imago Templi for an Invisible Church.

Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetic, by Martha M.F. Kelly

Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetic, by Martha M.F. Kelly

THE IMAGO TEMPLI OF THE INVISIBLE CHURCH: IDEALISM AND ABSTRACT ART.

Two events, apparently distant one from the other and without any direct link between them, but nevertheless strictly connected by a common spiritual legacy, constitute the subject of this paper. The first one, took place in 1971, when a very special «ecumenical chapel» opened its doors to the public. It is known under the name of «Rothko Chapel», due to the general project, undertaken by the painter Mark Rothko. Since that time, it has become one of the most precious artworks that represent the contemporary religious aesthetics. The black Rothko’s paintings, the Greek-cross building designed by the architect Philip Johnson, the Broken Obelisk of the artist Barnett Newman standing right out of the Chapel and the music composed for this ambient by the composer Morton Feldman, have replaced what traditionally has been called an «imago templi»; but contrary to all Christian tradition they represent (literally) no-thing. The second event, took place in 1795, when two young friends, Hegel and Schelling, were making a kind of oath under the sign of an Invisible Church, actualizing an ambiguous concept that, even if rooted in the Holy Scriptures, it had been condemned for its consequences as heretical. The relationship between these two events is given by contemporary art historians which have established that modern abstract painting, from a formal point of view, is rooted in the Romantic tradition. With this paper I would like to contribute to the establishment of this connection, not only by formal means, but by showing a common spiritual attitude towards images. Christianity, essentially figurative in its religious aesthetics, has always had to deal with the Jewish prohibition of image-making. This difficulty has been inherited to contemporary debates in which artist with classical readings and education, often of Jewish origins but active in Christian societies, try to create a new kind of art, above all traditions and free of dogmas. According to my suggestion, Rothko Chapel should be considered as the realization of a fragile balance in which both «aniconism» and «need of images» have simultaneously sublated their one-sidedness, producing a higher spiritual stage. Thus, such a chapel would not be a simple space where all religions could only meet and undertake a dialog, but should be considered as something more surprising: a unique realization of what logically appears as a pure contradiction: the realization of an Imago Templi for an Invisible Church.

Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetic by Martha M. F. Kelly

Religion & Literature 202 two” (179). To accept Emerson’s politics without its metaphysical base is to undercut the source of its power. Noticeably in the last third of the book, once he has had the opportunity to establish Emerson’s first principle, Urbas becomes more open to consider postmodern interpretations as long as we read Emerson’s skepticism against his metaphysical background: “Emerson’s skeptical moments, in any case, were just that—moments” (164, italics in original). Only then can we properly assess something of a “relative shift” that occurs in Emerson’s writings: “it is difficult to imagine the early Emerson writing ‘Experience,’ ‘Montaigne,’ or ‘Fate’” (156, italics in original). But the shift is nevertheless “along the causal continuum of mind and world,” sliding “the cursor a few notches towards the objective end of the scale, laying greater stress on being and the pre-existing causal order” (168). Those of us who have benefitted greatly from Cavell’s work can find some relief when Urbas concludes we need both sides “To do justice to the full complexity of Emerson’s thought” (206). Questions remain about how individuals or societies align themselves with an impersonal Transcendental Cause and what might get in the way of proper alignment—questions that might require us to hold onto Cavell or Richard Poirier and others after all. But such questions are best asked with a careful consideration of the historical context that nourished Emerson ’s skepticism and optimism both. To the latter end Urbas offers his own important contribution to keep Emerson’s metaphysical and religious relevance alive. Tae Sung California Baptist University Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetic Martha M. F. Kelly Northwestern University Press, 2016. xvi + 285 pp. $120 cloth, $39.95 paperback. In this book, Martha M. F. Kelly explores the ways in which Russian modernists appropriated Orthodox traditions to construct an aesthetics of transfiguration and new models of religious practice. She focuses on poetry , devoting separate chapters to Alexander Blok, Mikhail Kuzmin, Boris Pasternak, and Anna Akhmatova as well as one brief “excursus” each to Marina Tsvetaeva and Osip Mandelstam, respectively. These six poets all rose to prominence during the last two decades of Tsarist Russia, and they BOOK REVIEWS 203 remain canonical figures in what is commonly referred to as the Silver Age of Russian poetry (ca. 1890–1921). As Kelly notes, these poets were not religious artists in any conventional sense. Pasternak, for example, began to attend Russian Orthodox services regularly after World War II, and Kuzmin’s lifelong spiritual quest involved extensive reading of Eastern Christian texts, including hymns, service books, and devotional literature. Yet in their poetry and nonfiction both writers—no less than their contemporaries—depart substantially from the theology and ethics of the official Russian Orthodox Church. Despite their diverging styles and religious commitments, the poets that Kelly examines all shared with other modernist artists and thinkers a collective striving for new aesthetic forms that could unify flesh and spirit and effect a broad transformation of Russian society. This collective task had its origins in Russia’s reception of Friedrich Nietzsche and especially in the sophiology of religious philosopher Vladimir Solovyov, and its pursuit involved a widespread appropriation of Orthodox artistic and liturgical traditions for often radically unorthodox ends. Kelly concludes her study with an examination of Olga Sedakova, a contemporary writer who draws on Orthodox liturgy and modernist literary traditions in both her poetry and scholarship. In perhaps her most provocative thesis, Kelly argues that “Russian modernism was a religious movement of a unique kind” (5). In the first chapter, Kelly analyzes Blok’s early poetry, including his 1904 poem cycle Verses on the Most Beautiful Lady, a fundamental text in the transition from Solovyov’s fin-de-siècle figure of the Divine Sophia, with its focus on the Spirit, to a much broader “theurgic” or “sophianic task” in which modernist poets aimed to transfigure the material world. This sophianic task updated the Orthodox notion of theosis—that is, the deification of the body—through a new aesthetics responsive to the demands of modernity. In the case of Blok, Kelly reexamines his equivocal incarnations of Sophia in light of...

Emerging Patterns of Authority in Early Shiʿism: al-Mukhtār and the Aesthetics of Persuasion

Abstract In this study the author examines some aspects of authority in the movement of the Shiʿite leader al-Mukhtār (d. 67/687). The notion of religious aesthetics as developed by Birgit Meyer is used as an analytical tool. It is argued that al-Mukhtār accomplished his political endeavour partly by introducing and controlling three “aesthetic forms” which functioned as “media” between the people and the deceased ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib: his claim to act on behalf of ʿAlī’s son Ibn al-Ḥanafiyya, whom he called al-mahdī, “the rightly guided”; his call to revenge for the killing of ʿAlī’s son Ḥusayn; and his exhibiting of a chair that he claimed had belonged to ʿAlī. The accounts of these three media, the author furthermore argues, have an historical foundation. Finally he holds that through these media al-Mukhtār was able to channel the needs and aspirations of many of the Shiites of Kufa into political action.

Catholic in Kraków? Fur, the ethic of attribution, and when non-religious things conform to religious aesthetics

Based upon ethnographic fieldwork conducted in the Polish city of Kraków, this article explores the grounds on which people judge certain aesthetics to be ‘Catholic’ – despite the actuality that the visual and material culture concerned falls outside of what is more classically considered to be religious material culture. In particular, the article discusses the materially and symbolically complex material of fur, and the conflicting ideas about its relationship with Catholicism, especially what it means for a thing to have a ‘Catholic look’ in a place where Catholic culture is predominant. The article explains the efforts of some informants to define Catholic aesthetics by referencing ‘natural beauty’. More broadly, this study about fur and Catholicism in Kraków highlights the local importance of deliberating over and contesting the meanings of aesthetics – a mode of action described here as an ‘ethic of attribution’.

Tasting Islam: religious aesthetics and modernity in a contemporary Egyptian Sufi brotherhood

This article describes the convergence of Sufi and modern traditions of thought within ritual practices in an Egyptian brotherhood and its Europeans branches. I disentangle the different threads behind one of my interlocutor’s words and experience of dhawq (taste), a spiritual sense that in Sufi tradition reconnects the disciple to the divine. I argue that the way my interlocutors experience dhawq builds up into a form of religious aesthetics and architecture of the self that draw on the encounter with European psychological traditions. Distinctive in this encounter is that the self emerges as the location of an experience that is always, and already, an experience of transcendence, of an outside that is constitutive of selfhood. By putting into dialogue two traditions of knowledge that stand at the margins of the modern world, namely the esoteric trend of Sufi tradition and the Gestalt tradition, my interlocutors’ religious aesthetics promotes an architecture of the self that is alternative to hegemonic understandings of modern Islam structuring the contemporary Egyptian public sphere, as it foregrounds divine intervention and backgrounds individual responsibility and action.

BOOK REVIEWS

Books reviewed in this issueLiterature and Fine ArtsChadaga, Julie Bekman. Optical Play: Glass, Vision, and Spectacle in Russian Culture.Du Quenoy, Paul. Alexander Serov and the Birth of the Russian Modern.Sleptsov, Vasily. Hard Times: A Novel of Liberals and Radicals in 1860s Russia.Brunson, Molly. Russian Realisms: Literature and Painting, 1840–1890.Friesen, Leonard. Transcendent Love: Dostoevsky and the Search for a Global Ethic.Belknap, Robert L. Plots.Solovyov, Vladimir. The Burning Bush: Writings on Jews and Judaism.Knapp, Liza. Anna Karenina and Others: Tolstoy's Labyrinth of Plots.Bialostosky, Don. Mikhail Bakhtin. Rhetoric, Poetics, Dialogics, Rhetoreticality.Kliger, Ilya, and Boris Maslov, eds. Persistent Forms: Explorations in Historical Poetics.Kelly, Martha M. F. Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetic.Poplavsky, Boris. Apollon Bezobrazov.Mancosu, Paolo. Zhivago's Secret Journey: From Typescript to Book.De Vries, Gerard. Silent Love: The Annotation and Interpretation of Nabokov's The Real Life of Sebastian Knight.Lipovetsky, Mark, and Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, eds. Late and Post‐Soviet Russian Literature: A Reader. Book 1. Perestroika and the Post‐Soviet Period.Lipovetsky, Mark, and Lisa Ryoko Wakamiya, eds. Late and Post‐Soviet Russian Literature: A Reader. Book 2. Thaw and Stagnation.Prokhorov, Alexander, and Elena Prokhorova. Film and Television Genres of the Late Soviet Era.HistoryGeffert, Bryn, and Theofanis G. Stavrou, eds. Eastern Orthodox Christianity: The Essential Texts.Raffensperger, Christian. Ties of Kinship: Genealogy and Dynastic Marriage in Kyivan Rus'.Monahan, Erika. The Merchants of Siberia: Trade in Early Modern Eurasia.Chrissidis, Nikolaos A. An Academy at the Court of the Tsars: Greek Scholars and Jesuit Education in Early Modern Russia.Kelly, Aileen. The Discovery of Chance: The Life and Times of Alexander Herzen.Rabow‐Edling, Susanna. Married to the Empire: Three Governors' Wives in Russian America, 1829–1864.Nalivkin, Vladimir, and Maria Nalivkina. Muslim Women in the Fergana Valley: A 19th‐Century Ethnography from Central Asia.Marchenia, P. P., A. O. Lanshin, and S. Iu. Razin. Narod i vlast' v rossiiskoi/smute.Marchenia, P. P., et al. Krest'ianstvo i vlast' v istorii Rossii XX veka.Marchenia, P. P., et al. Rossiia i revoliutsiia: Proshloe i nastoiashchee sistemnykh krizisov russkoi istorii.Marchenia, P. P., et al. Stalinizm i krest'ianstvo.Demidov, Sergei S., and Boris V. Levshin, eds. The Case of Academician Nikolai Nikolaevich Luzin.Lees, Lorraine M., and Williams S. Rodner, eds. An American Diplomat in Bolshevik Russia: DeWitt Clinton Poole.Oosterlinck, Kim. Hope Springs Eternal: French Bondholders and the Repudiation of Russian Sovereign Debt.Goldman, Wendy Z., and Donald Filtzer, eds. Hunger and War: Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II.Kilian, Jürgen. Wehrmacht und Besatzungsherrschaft im Russischen Nordwesten 1941–1944: Praxis und Alltag im Militärverwaltungsgebiet der Heersgruppe Nord.Kucherenko, Olga. Soviet Street Children and the Second World War: Welfare and Social Control under Stalin.Polišenská, Milada. Czechoslovak Diplomacy and the Gulag: Deportation of Czechoslovak Citizens to the USSR and the Negotiation for their Repatriation, 1945–1953.Liber, George O. Total Wars and the Making of Modern Ukraine, 1914–1954.Rubenstein, Joshua. The Last Days of Stalin.Sanchez‐Sibony, Oscar. Red Globalization: The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold War from Stalin to Khrushchev.Peters, Benjamin. How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet.Florin, Moritz. Kirgistan und die sowjetische Moderne.Braithwaite, Rodric. Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan, 1979–89.Tax Choldin, Marianna. Garden of Broken Statues: Exploring Censorship in Russia.Social Sciences, Contemporary Russia, and OtherJohnson, Juliet. Priests of Prosperity: How Central Bankers Transformed the Postcommunist World.Kaliszewska, Iwona, and Maciej Falkowski. Veiled and Unveiled in Chechnya and Daghestan.Ryazanova‐Clarke, Lara, ed. The Russian Language Outside the Nation.Polese, Abel. Limits of a Post‐Soviet State: How Informality Replaces, Renegotiates, and Reshapes Governance in Contemporary Ukraine.

Stone-agency: sense, sight and magical efficacy in traditions of the Highlands and Islands of Scotland

ABSTRACTThis article examines the materiality and mediality of sacred and ‘magical’ stones in Northern European vernacular belief practices (especially Gaelic traditions). In particular, it considers their attribution to specific deities and metaphysical beings, their role in healing rituals and in enabling humans to perceive metaphysical realms. The paper’s focus – via methodologies and theories recently developed in both religious aesthetics and ‘new materialism’ – is on the materiality and ontology of the objects and the associated visions and the ‘relations’ such stones are understood to have produced. As ‘sites’ of divine agency and efficacy the stones (including orthostats, amulets and prehistoric flints) were imbued not only with spiritual agency, but also placed within an invisible network of relations that linked individuals, non-human animals, the landscape and the metaphysical realms. This panoply of relations is crucial to the aesthetic logic guiding selection and ‘attribution’ to specific deities/spiritual beings. The theoretical framework for this discussion explores the degree to which such material culture can be considered ‘aniconic’ and the attendant conceptualisation of ‘efficacy’ and ‘agency’ as applied to interpreting the religious function of the stones.

Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetic. By Martha M. F. Kelly . Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. xvi, 285 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Photographs. $39.95, paper.

Unorthodox Beauty: Russian Modernism and Its New Religious Aesthetic. By Martha M. F. Kelly . Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016. xvi, 285 pp. Appendix. Notes. Bibliography. Photographs. $39.95, paper. - Volume 76 Issue 2

Religious Aesthetics of Wedding Invitation Cards in East Java Community

Religious Aesthetics of Wedding Invitation Cards in East Java Community

Comentario a “Estética apofática y hermenéutica del misterio” de A. Vega

<p class="p1">En este comentario se plantean al autor cuatro preguntas; la primera es ¿cuál es la diferencia entre la estética apofática y la hermenéutica del misterio?; la segunda es respecto del tipo de emociones que suscita la estética apofática; la tercera, si la estética apofática podría aplicarse al arte figurativo y, por último, la cuarta versa sobre el papel del ritual y la repetición dentro del proyecto de la estética apofática.</p>

‘Religions of Practice’: The Case of Japanese Religions

‘Religions of practice’ are religions that prioritize ritual practice, with little concern for creeds and belief. In these religions, ethical obligations are communicated through ritual practices and aesthetic responses to symbols. Some theories of religion characterize ritual practice and religious aesthetics as secondary outcomes of religious belief. Such characterizations misunderstand the significance of religious ritual practice. A neo-Durkheimian theory of religion that examines ritual practice alongside belief provides a more sophisticated understanding of religious experience. A range of ethnographies of Japanese religions are reviewed to illustrate the argument. Aesthetics and ritual performance are central to many Japanese religions. These generate a strong sense of relational and communal entwinement and are associated with an ambivalent or pluralistic moral ontology.