Sensational Religion contributes to a growing body of work on religion and the legacy modernity has wrought, namely the presumed incompatibility between material sensation and “enlightened” faith. The volume, which is the product of an ongoing collaboration through Yale University's Initiative for the Study of Material and Visual Cultures of Religion (MAVCOR), brings together thirty-five chapters by a broad range of collaborators, including a number of current and former Yale graduate students. “Sensation,” the concept that bridges these varied case studies, appears in three overlapping ways: the multisensory experience of religion in concrete instances; the relationship between materiality, embodiment, and cognition; and controversies related to senses (e.g. iconoclasm, censoring, or blasphemy).
Yale University Press has a deserved reputation in art history publishing; this is a stunning book, containing nearly 200 high-quality reproductions. Promey does an admirable job weaving together the (many) chapters so as to provide coherence without being overly reductive. Besides her own chapter, she contributes an introduction and conclusion, as well as short essays that frame five thematic sections: inhabitations, contested grounds, transgressions, devotional bodies, and transformations. Promey brings her training as an art historian to bear in these short pieces. Each one begins with a provocative image—artist Alex Donis's print of Lord Rama planting a kiss on Jesus (256) or the photo of a young woman in Los Angeles with angel wings tattooed across her back (456)—that connects to the theme that follows. Of the five thematic sections, two are “interludes” that feature shorter essays, conceived partly to include curators, practitioners, and art critics (although, disappointingly, by my count James Clifton was in fact the only contributor not directly connected to a university).
The chapters in Sensational Religion demonstrate how sensation and cognition are co-constitutive and entangled. Building on broader discussions in religious studies, American religious history and beyond, Promey foregrounds secularism as one of the book's overarching themes. Drawing on Janet Jakobsen and Ann Pellegrini (Secularisms [Duke University, 2008]), she notes that modernity has thrived on a series of supersessionary binaries, including sacred/secular, image/word, and emotion/reason. Contextualizing secularism within the history of religious art, Promey describes how the modern development of “art” as a category repurposed religious things by associating them with the refined contemplation of aesthetics rather than bodily engagement. Promey illustrates these ideas with various evocative examples: mid-century American fine art connoisseurs saved Russian icons from destruction, while remaining insensible to the physical destruction of priests and monks (6); guards at the MOMA clean up the offerings left at the Buddhist objects supposedly sanitized as (only) art for the visiting public (204).
Sensational Religion is inspired in part by the “new materialism,” an ontological project that has emerged among mainly European theorists. New materialists focus on objects' own agency, usually from a philosophical or ethical standpoint. Though Sensational Religion does not adopt this orientation per se, many essays do follow what Promey calls a “relational theory of material agency” that recognizes the “active stance” of objects. In other words, the chapters acknowledge that an object's material form shapes how humans interact with and perceive it, sometimes meeting and other times confounding human expectations (9). Although Promey notes that this cluster of concepts might be considered a subsidiary theme of the volume, it would require more explication (perhaps even a devoted thematic section) for readers uninitiated in the new materialism to engage it fully.
The quality of the individual chapters is very high. They focus largely on the modern West (by design, given the contributors' interest in modernity and secularism) and many chapters are directly relevant for historians of Christianity. In “Transgressions,” for example, a trio of essays by art historians contrasts sanctified acts of violence: Vasileios Marinis explores Byzantine iconoclasm, June Hargrove details artist Paul Gaugin's philosophical and aesthetic ruminations as he died, and Mia Mochizuki describes the shock value of Jesuit martyrdoms in Japan. The essays clustered under the volume's final theme, “Transformations,” offer especially interesting juxtapositions. They engage with the overarching theme of religious objects transformed into art by modern aesthetes and collectors, but also move well beyond it. Finbarr Barry Flood compares how sacred matter transubstantiates through ingestion in Islam and Christianity. Meredith Gamer tells the rather gruesome story of the Anatomical Crucifixion in 1801, when a team of sculptors and painters used a fresh corpse as the basis for a life-like representation of Jesus' death, now housed in London's Royal Academy of Arts. Meredith Gill traces fascinating controversies in early modern Catholic art about how to portray Lucifer and the rebel angels' fall from Heaven (and transformation into earthly bodies). David Walker and Sally Promey end with complementary chapters on the transformation of landscapes into religious/spiritual spaces (and vice versa) through tourism in Utah and Hawaii.
Depending on one's disciplinary point of departure, Promey's introduction may sound radical or somewhat run-of-the-mill. In critical theory and anthropology of religion, for example, work on secularism, materiality, and modernity have been circulating for more than a decade, as Promey notes; indeed, she draws on a number of major thinkers in these fields, including Talal Asad, Webb Keane, and Jane Bennett. The volume also focuses on material and visual religious culture rather than the much less studied senses, such as taste, smell, or hearing. Visuality remains the most relevant subject of scholarly critique, argues Promey, precisely because studies of religion have consistently privileged the eye over other senses (“the visualist regime of modernity,” in Constance Classen's evocative phrase; see The Colour of Angels: Cosmology, Gender and the Aesthetic Imagination [Routledge, 1998]). Thus it may lead us, Promey writes, to a fuller consideration of the human sensorium (11). It is intriguing to imagine this highly talented team of contributors tackling a broader sensory spectrum. And as the volume represents an ongoing conversation at MAVCOR, we may yet see that happen.
