Lived Religion
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Lived religion is the
ethnographic Ethnography is a branch of anthropology and the systematic study of individual cultures. It explores cultural phenomena from the point of view of the subject of the study. Ethnography is also a type of social research that involves examining ...
and
holistic Holism is the interdisciplinary idea that systems possess properties as wholes apart from the properties of their component parts. Julian Tudor Hart (2010''The Political Economy of Health Care''pp.106, 258 The aphorism "The whole is greater than t ...
framework in the
sociology of religion Sociology of religion is the study of the beliefs, practices and organizational forms of religion using the tools and methods of the discipline of sociology. This objective investigation may include the use both of Quantitative research, quantit ...
and religious studies more broadly for understanding the religion as it is practiced by ordinary people in the contexts of everyday life, including domestic, work, commercial, community, and institutional religious settings. The term comes from the French tradition of sociology of religion, or "''la religion vécue''" though it has followed its own trajectory among scholars with backgrounds in anthropology, cultural studies, history, and sociology or religion as well as religious studies and theology. It is also referred to as "everyday religion" and "living religion." The concept of lived religion was popularized in the late 20th century by religious study scholars like
Nancy Ammerman Nancy Tatom Ammerman (born 1950) is an American professor of sociology of religion Sociology of religion is the study of the beliefs, practices and organizational forms of religion using the tools and methods of the discipline of sociology. T ...
, David D. Hall, Meredith McGuire, and Robert A. Orsi. The study of lived religion has come to include a wide range of subject areas as a means of exploring and emphasizing 1) ordinary people as religious subjects over against the traditional focus in religious studies on élite practitioners of religion; 2) religious practices and material resources, including human bodies, over against a traditional focus on religious doctrine, dogma, and ideologies primarily engaged in written texts; 3) sites of religious practice outside of institutional religious settings; and 4) ways of understanding religion as particular, local, variable, and otherwise shaped by the specific cultural, social, political, material, and other contexts of human experience rather than as a ''sui generis'' universal phenomenon focused on beliefs, sacred texts, and notions of the sacred as separate from the ordinary.


Scholars


Nancy T. Ammerman

Nancy T. Ammerman is Professor Emerita of Sociology of Religion at
Boston University Boston University (BU) is a Private university, private research university in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. BU was founded in 1839 by a group of Boston Methodism, Methodists with its original campus in Newbury (town), Vermont, Newbur ...
. Her edited anthology ''Everyday Religion: Observing Modern Religious Lives'' was a significant advance in the study of everyday religion—the term she tends to prefer—by bringing together work by scholars such as Courtney Bender and Meredith McGuire who have shaped the study of living religion significantly. Ammerman studies religion as it plays out in the everyday lives of ordinary people and the contexts they inhabit—homes, offices, healthcare facilities, as well as institutional religious settings. Her approach, illustrated in ''Sacred Stories, Spiritual Tribes: Finding Religion in Everyday Life'' and detailed methodologically in ''Studying Lived Religion: Contexts and Practices,'' draws on the narrative and photographic reports of subjects' descriptions of their religious practices and resources in diverse fields of lived experience.


Meredith McGuire

Meredith McGuire is Professor Emerita of sociology and anthropology at Trinity University in
San Antonio, Texas San Antonio ( ; Spanish for "Anthony of Padua, Saint Anthony") is a city in the U.S. state of Texas and the most populous city in Greater San Antonio. San Antonio is the List of Texas metropolitan areas, third-largest metropolitan area in Texa ...
. She is the former President of the
Society for the Scientific Study of Religion The Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (was founded at Harvard University in 1949) was formed to advance research in the social scientific perspective on religious institutions and experiences. The ''Journal for the Scientific Study of ...
and the
Association for the Sociology of Religion The Association for the Sociology of Religion (ASR) is an academic association with more than 700 members worldwide. It publishes a journal, ''Sociology of Religion'', and holds meetings at the same venues and times as the American Sociological As ...
. Her notable contributions to the study of living religion include ''Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life,'' ''Religion: The Social Context,'' and ''Ritual Healing in Suburban America.'' Her work has been particularly important in highlighting the role of embodied experience in the practice of religion, drawing on
Maurice Merleau-Ponty Maurice Jean Jacques Merleau-Ponty. ( ; ; 14 March 1908 – 3 May 1961) was a French phenomenological philosopher, strongly influenced by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. The constitution of meaning in human experience was his main interes ...
's concept of the "lived body" as the locus of human engagement with reality. McGuire's work illustrates the ways in which religion as practiced by ordinary people in the contexts of everyday life is often significantly different from "religion as prescribed"


Robert Orsi

Robert A. Orsi is Professor of Religious Studies and History and Grace Craddock Nagle Chair in Catholic Studies at
Northwestern University Northwestern University (NU) is a Private university, private research university in Evanston, Illinois, United States. Established in 1851 to serve the historic Northwest Territory, it is the oldest University charter, chartered university in ...
. He researches, writes, and teaches about religion in the United States, in the past and in contemporary contexts, with a particular focus on American Catholicism. Orsi’s book ''The Madonna of 115th Street: Faith And Community In Italian Harlem, 1880-1950'', won several prizes including the Jesuit National Book Award and is an example study of lived religion. Orsi defines lived religion as including "the work of social agents/actors themselves as narrators and interpreters (and reinterpreters) of their own experiences and histories, recognizing that the stories we tell about others exist alongside the many and varied story they tell of themselves". Orsi understands lived religion to be centered on the actions and interpretations of religious persons. He is less attentive to the uses of religion by people who may not identify as "religious" or who are not affiliated with institutional religious traditions. In "Everyday Miracles: The Study of Lived Religion," Orsi identifies four basic elements of living religion: 1) idiomatic expressions of religion, what limits are placed on then and what possibilities are open for their use in specific cultural settings; 2) knowledges of the body cultivated through religious practices; 3) structures of social experience created and reinforced through religious experience; and 4) characteristic tensions in everyday life that emerge within religious contexts. To this basic framework, 5) the role of religion in the cultivation of place as sacred or hold, secular or profane may be added as well as 60 the functions of religious discourse in everyday life can be added. In order to study and write about lived religion, Orsi suggests a broad field of study in terms of topic matter and methodology. Orsi describes his own process of studying lived religion for ''Madonna On 115th Street'' as wide in scope. "I came to realize that I was learning as much from how people were to me as from what they were telling me, as much as what was going on around the stories as from the stories themselves." Rather than a narrow archival study, Orsi’s focus on non-traditional forms of research demands that scholars give attention to institutions ''and'' persons, texts ''and'' rituals, practices ''and'' theology, things ''and'' ideas. In order to study lived religion, Orsi advocates for a complex academic lens where almost anything can hold meaning and serve as a source or "text" for study. In ''The Madonna Of 115th Street'', Orsi studies the lived religion of Catholic Italian immigrants in
Harlem Harlem is a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, New York City. It is bounded roughly by the Hudson River on the west; the Harlem River and 155th Street on the north; Fifth Avenue on the east; and Central Park North on the south. The greater ...
New York. Orsi focuses on a particular religious celebration known as the '' festa'' for
The Madonna In Christian art, a Madonna () is a religious depiction of the Blessed Virgin Mary in a singular form or sometimes accompanied by the Child Jesus. These images are central icons for both the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches. The word ...
and the social structures that create and layer the event. Through observations, story telling, conversations and research Orsi weaves a picture of life for this immigrant community. In his book, Orsi explores and explains various internal traditions, cultures, and power and social dynamics in order to illustrate the various religious meanings and significance for community in Italian Harlem. Orsi talks about the importance of dynamic subject matter covered by the study of lived religion. "The study of lived religion is shaped by and shapes the way family life is organized, for instance; how the dead are buried, children disciplined, the past and present imagined, moral boundaries established and challenged, home constructed, maintained and destroyed, the gods and spirits worshiped and importuned and so on."


Orsi's critique of popular religion

Orsi critiques popular religion as being a limited framework and method for studying religion. Orsi claims that popular religion is “unclear, misleading, and tendentious”. Orsi notes that popular religion is concerned only with the practices of "common folk" and distinguishing popular religion practices as separate from “official religion”. In his introduction to The Madonna on 115th Street, he writes, "Popular religion served to seal off certain expressions of religious life from unspecified but obviously normative religion." Orsi is concerned with the limitations of popular religions because he sees it as potentially authorizing legitimacy and boundaries in religious practices and beliefs. For Orsi, the implied intent in popular religion is to highlight the primitive, ignorant, and often marginalized practitioners of popular religion as a means of "policing religion". Orsi’s scholarly move to lived religion as a theoretical framework was an attempt to provide a more holistic approach to religious studies and also highlights the perspective that "religious practices and understandings only have meaning in relations to other cultural forms and in relations to the life experiences and actual circumstance of the people using them".


David D. Hall

David D. Hall has been a faculty member at
Harvard Divinity School Harvard Divinity School (HDS) is one of the constituent schools of Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The school's mission is to educate its students either in the religious studies, academic study of religion or for leadership role ...
since 1989. Hall was Bartlett Professor of New England Church History until 2008, when he became Bartlett Research Professor. Hall writes extensively on religion and society in seventeenth-century New England and England. Hall edited a series of essays titled ''Lived Religion In America: Toward a History Of Practice'', which is a foundational compilation in the study of lived religion. Hall’s book covers topics including gift exchange, cremation, hymn singing and many other essays on lived and practiced religious belief. Many of Hall's students have gone on to become notable scholars in the field of lived religion. Hall defines lived religion as "rooted less in sociology than cultural and ethnographical approaches to the study of religion and American religious history". He instead sees lived religion as the study of the context and content about the practices of religious laity and their "everyday thinking". Hall believes that using lived religion as an approach to the study of religion allows for a wider interpretation of meaning and also provides an opportunity for historians to examine the past and present from many angles. For Hall, lived religion "does not depend on any single method or discipline". Hall also acknowledges the limitations of lived religion. Hall suggests that as a field, lived religion is "fluid, mobile, and incompletely structured". Hall calls lived religion an "imperfect tool" noting that even with a dynamic study of laity it is impossible to fully understand any one person’s religious practices, especially when summarizing from a single location be it time or place.


Hall's critique of popular religion

Hall distinguishes the study of lived religion from popular religion by saying that popular religion is concerned with hierarchy and opposition in religious beliefs and practices. Hall writes, "Popular religion has therefore come to signify the space that emerged between official or learned Christianity and the profane (or ‘pagan’) culture." Hall critiques popular religion as imposing normative perspectives on practices.


Tanya M. Luhrmann

In her book ''How God Becomes Real,'' Tanya Luhrmann explores how people from various faith backgrounds come to experience and feel God as vividly real. She explains that believers create the experience of God's presence and of faith through regular practices such as stories, cultivating inner senses, strong sensory experiences, prayer, and more.


See also

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Other notable scholars

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Courtney Bender
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María Del Socorro Castañeda

Elizabeth Drescher
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References


Notes


Bibliography

* * {{refend Religious studies