Digital Humanities and Material Religion

Book excerpt: Building from a range of essays representing multiple fields of expertise and traversing multiple religious traditions, this important text provides analytic rigor to a question now pressing the academic study of religion: what is the relationship between the material and the digital? Its chapters address a range of processes of mediation between the digital and the material from a variety of perspectives and sub-disciplines within the field of religion in order to theorize the implications of these two turns in scholarship, offer case studies in methodology, and reflect on various tools and processes. Authors attend to religious practices and the internet, digital archives of religion, decolonization, embodiment, digitization of religious artefacts and objects, and the ways in which varied relationships between the digital and the material shape religious life. Collectively, the volume demonstrates opportunities and challenges at the intersection of digital humanities and material religion. Rather than defining the bounds of a new field of inquiry, the essays make a compelling case, collectively and on their own, for the interpretive scrutiny required of the humanities in the digital age.