[Religion and the Visual] Introduction

Abstract

There is, among scholars of religion, a recent materialist turn that approaches the study of religion not primarily as a set of de-contextualized beliefs or as free-floating symbol-systems but as embodied practices. Part of this turn involves interdisciplinary attention to the visual aspects of belief. Thus images are no longer conceived mainly as illustrations of textual narratives or as supportive of abstract propositions but as a constitutive element of belief itself. David Morgan is among a cluster of scholars who have given this approach focused attention. In his The Sacred Gaze, in order to clarify what might be the academic approach to the study of this aspect of belief, Morgan describes what he terms “visual culture