In Vernacular Religion, religious historian Deborah Dash Moore assembles the research of the late folklorist and religious studies scholar Leonard Norman Primiano. Before passing in 2021, he left behind uniquely compassionate scholarship that brought audiences face-to-face with the mundane (though extraordinary) religious lives of everyday people. He achieved such vivid study of contemporary American religious life through his well-known device of “vernacular religion.” Combined with his gifted storytelling and analysis, Primiano's application of the “vernacular” displays how religion emerges from participants’ spiritual innovation and adaptation. To our great benefit, Moore's editorial labor prompts further engagement with such important concepts.

This volume is broken into three parts containing twelve body chapters, bookended by an introduction and coda. It is comprised of previously published journal articles and book chapters spanning Primiano's career, running from 1995 to 2018. Featuring impressive ethnographic research, this book immerses readers in a wide range of personal narratives and scholarly topics, including materiality, race, contemporary American Catholicism, space, food, music culture, sexuality, gender, and domestic life. Drawn from Primiano's much-cited 1995 essay, the introduction orients readers to the “vernacular religion” heuristic. Critiquing the presumed separation of “popular” and “official” religion, he once argued, we have much to gain by foregrounding the “creative” emergence of bespoke spiritual practices, theologies, and religious communities (3). This “negotiation” process, wherein religionists indigenize institutional doctrines and faithfully forge distinct local expressions, is where we find “religion as it is lived” (6).

Primiano's essays on North American religious material cultures offer the richest view of vernacular religion, and readers will probably enjoy situating them alongside the foundational scholarship of Colleen McDannell and David Morgan. Because the book is a collection of already-published work revolving around one theme, repetitiveness is noticeable and sometimes distracting. Given the visual – even sensual – nature of the research, it is also disappointing that readers do not encounter more imagery beyond the few pictures tucked in the middle of the text. Regardless, this is exemplary lived religion scholarship that is easily read, discussed, and taught. As a penetrating look at everyday spiritualities, Vernacular Religion asks us, quite valuably, to keep interrogating how we categorize “religion,” who gets to claim “true religion,” and how believing communities forge specialized religious lives.