Welcome to Material Culture of (Greater) Reading

MPK Chapel at Albright College,
home of the Religious Studies Department

Welcome to a blog created by the Senior Seminar of the Religious Studies Department at Albright College. This semester, the seminar is called "God's Attic: Religion and Material Culture." While the academic study of religion has often focused on religions' elite intellectual production such as theologies, philosophies, laws, and texts, over the past decades scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the sensory and material experiences of religion. In the senior seminar, we are exploring religion and material culture in two ways: first, we are considering objects as a form of primary source. Through objects, we are exploring different historical moments and gaining access to the religious experiences and practices of daily life. We are thinking about how paying attention to the objects people use can tell us about the lives of those whose big ideas are often not recorded or part of the public conversation, in particular women and minorities. Secondly, we are thinking about how sensory experiences shape religious experience. We are considering sound, smell, touch, taste, and vision as essential to understanding and shaping religious life.

This blog is dedicated to exploring the sounds, smells, tastes, feels, and the look of religion in southeastern Pennsylvania. We are in Reading, about an hour from Philadelphia and 40 minutes from Lancaster. We are an urban area surrounded by countryside. We will be sharing our images of religious life in our area over the course of the semester. Most of what we share will be public—things that you can go and see, but sometimes (and with people’s permission), we will delve into more personal aspects of religion and material culture—the stuff that shapes peoples religious lives, here on our campus and in our broader community.