Page - 199 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 07/01

Book Review: Material Christianity | 199 Its Place in the History of Religion”, and Mary-Jane Rubenstein, in “Pantheism Monstrosities: On Race, Gender, Divinity and Dirt”, explore concepts of pan- theism and ask whether resisting the clear separation between an external divine entity and the world could change how we look at materiality. Follow- ing such pantheistic worldviews, material agency and its efficacy cannot be considered mere products of humans but stand rather as independent entities in religious meaning-making processes. These short summaries of the essays collected in this volume emphasise the challenges linked to fundamental questions about how we describe, re- construct and conceptualise religion. First, the volume shows the crucial significance of historical and contemporary case studies for understanding the agencies of things, individuals, collectives and religious experts in con- stituting religious practices and beliefs. In doing so, it highlights the chal- lenge of defining appropriate categories for comparing particular and unique constellations in order to achieve a general reflection on material agency. If material agency is to be taken as independent of human activity, concepts like “religion” or “tradition” will need to be discussed anew. Along this line, the volume notes the problematic role of anthropocentric scholarly approaches throughout the history of research into religion and religious history. Thus the editors argue: “The issue moves from a question of how religion reflects social order, human imagination, and culture, to a question of how religious things and performances belong to an ecology that produces human nature, society, and culture. For culture is no longer the mere product of human action and phantasy. Like self and society, it is generated simultaneously by willful people acting in space and time and by physical things” (9). The case studies gathered in this volume are not linked by a common the- oretical approach or methodology and from this point of view, the book is no more than a collection. Nevertheless, it offers an intriguing contribution to a new approach to the study of religion where concepts that are often taken for granted, such as “agency”, “subject” and “object”, are opened up for new consideration. “Religion” becomes a less and less clear concept to delimit anthropocentric constructions of transcendence and the divine. Rather, it is transformed into a conceptual map with which one can order und connect questions about practices that characterise cultures and societies. The book as a whole can be used as an introduction to the field of material studies in religion; the individual contributions may also be of interest to scholars famil- iar with the specific contexts. www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/1, 197–199