Praying with the Senses: Contemporary Orthodox Christian Spirituality in Practice

Praying with the Senses: Contemporary Orthodox Christian Spirituality in Practice

How do people experience spirituality through what they see, hear, touch, and smell? Sonja Luehrmann and an international group of scholars assess how sensory experience shapes prayer and ritual practice among Eastern Orthodox Christians. Prayer, even when performed privately, is considered as a shared experience and act that links individuals and personal beliefs with a broader, institutional, or imagined faith community. It engages with material, visual, and aural culture including icons, relics, candles, pilgrimage, bells, and architectural spaces. Whether touching upon the use of icons in age of digital and electronic media, the impact of Facebook on prayer in Ethiopia, or the implications of praying using recordings, amplifiers, and loudspeakers, these timely essays present a sophisticated overview of the history of Eastern Orthodox Christianities. Taken as a whole they reveal prayer as a dynamic phenomenon in the devotional and ritual lives of Eastern Orthodox believers across Eastern Europe, the Middle East, North Africa, and South Asia. "These essays advance the understanding of Eastern Orthodox spiritual practices from a religious studies perspective, and they will likely stimulate new directions for research and teaching in this largely neglected area."― Reading Religion "This collection could well be a principal text in courses on contemporary spirituality and church life. And equally it could be used for retreats and for personal spiritual reading as well. It is a welcome addition to other fine work that explores popular spirituality."― St. Vladimir's Theological Quarterly "[T]he contributors to this volume offer a number of valuable insights into questions of personhood, mediation, tradition, authority, publicity, intimacy, belonging, and the theological valences we attach to the human sensorium. Their collective labor demonstrates that Eastern Christianity is rich soil for anthropological inquiry from a number of vantage-points and for a host of theoretical interests."― AnthroCyBib "A well-documented, interdisciplinary examination of devotional practices, rituals, and understandings of prayer in contemporary lived forms of Eastern Christianity across a wide variety of traditions, including Coptic, Ethiopian, Greek, Indian, Russian, Syrian, and Ukranian. These essays define the phenomenon of prayer broadly in both its private and collective liturgical dimensions."―Vera Shevzov, author of Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution "Precisely by looking at so varied a group of locations home to Orthodox practice, this book conveys the fragility―and durability―of traditional religion in a postmodern, secular age."―Nadieszda Kizenko, author of A Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People "This volume is as enriching as it is ground-breaking. It will definitely be a companion to students of religion and Eastern Orthodoxy from various disciplines, complementing the theological and historical approaches to Eastern Christianity."― Journal of Orthodox Christian Studies Precisely by looking at so varied a group of locations home to Orthodox practice, this book conveys the fragility―and durability―of traditional religion in a postmodern, secular age. -- Nadieszda Kizenko Sonja Luehrmann is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada. She is author of Secularism Soviet Style: Teaching Atheism and Religion in a Volga Republic (IUP) and Religion in Secular Archives: Soviet Atheism and Historical Knowledge .