Adrian Hermann

Studying religion, audiovisual media, and the production of the ‘religious real’: introducing a review symposium on Birgit Meyer’s Sensational Movies (2015)

This article introduces a review symposium on Birgit Meyer’s book Sensational Movies: Video, Vision, and Christianity in Ghana (Oakland: University of California Press, 2015). It summarizes the structure and argument of the book, presents the six contributions to the review symposium as well as Meyer’s response, and in closing relates the religious use of audiovisual media to theoretical debates on documentary film in order to reflect on the production of what could be called the ‘religious real.’

The Early Periodicals of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente (1903–1904) and the Emergence of a Transregional and Transcontinental Indigenous-Christian Public Sphere

The early periodicals of the Iglesia Filipina Independiente (IFI), La Verdad (1903) and La Iglesia Filipina Independiente: Revista Católica (1903–1904), have been quoted as primary sources but have not been explored in their own right. Since its beginnings, the IFI understood itself as belonging to a transcontinental, global movement of independent Catholic churches. The periodicals published various letters that the IFI had received from foreign Catholic groups that were similarly independent of Rome. This research note focuses on these periodicals and locates the IFI in an emerging transregional and transcontinental indigenous-Christian public sphere.

Museality as a matrix of the production, reception, and circulation of knowledge concerning religion

Aesthetics of religion focuses on the sensual and representational aspects of religion and develops appropriate terminological tools. The idea of museality as an analytical and heuristic term for culture analysis is specified in the present paper by linking it to the history and dynamics of knowledge. Museums as institutions and cultural practice play a crucial role in the orders and politics of knowledge about religion in Europe. By means of different examples, museality is described as a specific and historically generated cultural pattern of perceiving, imagining, and knowing about religion in modernity. The examples focus on the production of different qualities of knowledge in exhibitions relating to religion, on transitions between religion and science in museums, and on popularisation as a mode of the circulation of knowledge about religion. These reflections on museality and knowledge dynamics could provide new potentials for inter-connective academic research, as well as for trans-disciplinary cooperation between the study of religion and museums.