David Morgan (2) (1957–)

A useful introduction, particularly for undergraduate students, which explores religion from a material studies perspective—in other words, an exploration of how religions and religious worldviews are as much about things, places, bodies, and forces as they are ideas and dogmas. David Morgan's case studies—such as of the history of Notre Dame de Paris as a centre of civic religion, or of the shifting categorisations of a group of Polynesian deity objects as they move from revered loci of divine power to aesthetic objects in a museum—were a little bland for me but I think probably pitched at the right level for undergraduate students who are trying to wrap their heads around the concepts introduced by Morgan in the initial theoretical chapters. Those provide a useful synthesis of the material turn in religious studies—though I have to admit to an ongoing, instinctive refusal to accept that an inanimate object like a stone or a wrench can have agency. I know! I have tried! I can't!… (mehr)