Seite - 198 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Band 07/01

198 | Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati www.jrfm.eu 2021, 7/1, 197–199 various streams of the Protestant Reformation in the 16th century. Focussing on the tension between objects and symbols, between imagination and the physical world, between memory and real presence, he highlights the role of bread and wine in articulating new and controversial approaches to the body of Christ. Within the structure of the book, these first two contributions are complementary, since they deal with different material agencies that shape the relationship between believers and Christ as well as the practices of forming, regulating and controlling the effects of things in the relationship between communities and the divine. Mark A. Peterson’s contribution, “Puri- tanism and Refinement in Early New England: Reflections on Communion and Silver”, analyses silver objects used in a religious tradition that is not usually associated with refinement and splendour. In comparing the recurrence and function of precious objects in both religious rituals and domestic practices, he questions scholarly assumptions about the radical condemnation of luxury. The article shows how a culture of refinement was compatible with Puritan- ism because the objects could express a communitarian and personal link to revelation. Samuel F. Robinson’s “The Problem of the Flesh: Vegetarianism and Edible Matters” focusses on controversial interpretations of food practices in the 17th and 18th centuries. Discussing vegetarian diets promoted by Roger Crab and later by Thomas Tryon, the chapter shows how readings of the agen- cy of food relate to various theologies of the body in the early modern era. The second part of the volume is dedicated to “Spaces”. In “San Diego the Pamatácuaro: A Mountain Shrine in Colonial Mexico”, Martin Austin Nesvig discusses the role of materiality in a devotional practice in a remote location. By erecting a shrine, a late 16th-century community unfamiliar with the po- litical, religious and linguistic culture of the colonial power shaped the cult of the Catholic saint associated with their town. The result is a peculiar form of devotion based on the needs of and beliefs rooted in this place; material agency led in this case to the autonomous agency of the inhabitants. The fol- lowing chapter takes the readers to a different place and time: leaving early modern Mexico they arrive in contemporary California. In “Labyrinths as an Embodied Pilgrimage Experience: An Ignatian Case Study”, Kathryn Barush reflects on the relationship between the spatial materiality of a labyrinth – an obligatory, delimited path with strong metaphorical significance that has been used in Christianity since the 4th century – and the bodily experience of walking as a form of religious reflection. The last two chapters are dedicated to the intriguing question of pantheism from the perspective of philosophy of religion. Raphael Lataster and Purushottana Bilimoria, in “Pantheism and