What is it about?
The article shows how various frameworks - material religion, cultural studies, spatiality theory, and discourse theory - can be integrated to work together to illuminate how Roman imperial era Mithras-cult sites and the fourth century Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem functioned as imperial projects.
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Why is it important?
The article is not only an introduction and example of adaptation of various theoretical frameworks, but it also demonstrates how religion is a product of material, human processes. In particular, the article argues against viewing religion as transcendent phenomenon (e.g., the sacred that irrupts into this material world), but as a collective noun for normal human, material processes of identity formations.
Perspectives
I hope this article makes visible how one can transcend the narrow boundaries of specific methods and theories to arrive at integrated understandings of religious phenomena and discourses.
Prof Gerhard G A van den Heever
University of South Africa
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Of Materiality, Cultic Spaces, and Agency … and Discourse in Between: The Entanglement of Religious Space, Discourse, and Practice in Two Case Studies—Two Mithraea and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, Journal of Early Christian History, September 2023, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/2222582x.2023.2299347.
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