S. Brent Plate is visiting associate professor of religious studies at Hamilton College and co-founder and managing editor of Material Religion- The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief. His writings have been published in the Washington Post, Huffington Post, Chronicle of Higher Education, and Religion Dispatches. His books include Religion and Film- Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World and Blasphemy- Art that Offends.
"Plate's provocative, contemplative, and beautifully written book
aims to do just what its subtitle promises: to bring the spiritual
and the religious 'to its senses.' Back to its senses, really.
Religion, he makes powerfully clear, is first and foremost about
things, and how our bodies relate to those things -- that is, how
we literally incorporate them into our beliefs and practices....
Plate's very sensual, poetic style of writing encourages a kind of
sensory mindfulness that, when you stop reading and look around,
begins to change how you see things and your relationships with
them."
--Timothy Beal, Los Angeles Review of Books "[Plate's] book is an
extended exercise in the materiality of faith. You might even call
it a manifesto. Blurring the lines between inquiry and advocacy, it
doesn't just ask us to consider the multiple ways in which religion
is a tactile phenomenon. It also calls on us to affirm and perhaps
even to celebrate the sensory elements of faith....Plate's
interpretations, his reading of material culture, are often
downright revelatory."
--Jenna Weissman Joselit, The New Republic "A timely, lively,
lovely conversation partner for students, as well as for the rest
of us."
--ARTS "The well-written and accessible text surprises and
intrigues...this is an elegant and sensitive book. Highly
recommended to general readers open to a different perspective on
religious practice."
--Library Journal, starred review "Sometimes the title of a book is
simply irresistible, and that's true of A History of Religion in 5
1/2 Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to Its Senses."
--The Jewish Journal "[Plate] succeeds in helping us see that
religion is best expressed not in transcendent experiences but in
"sensual engagement with the physical objects of the world."
Hopefully, this poignant work will draw many to see and appreciate
that objects have their own voice, worth, power, and magic."
--Spirituality and Practice "Brent Plate has unspooled a deeply
compelling, remarkably capacious lyric mediation on the primacy of
our human connection to the world. This global survey deftly braids
a rich consideration of five ubiquitous objects of faith and art
with small experiences from our modern daily lives in an effort to
reawaken us to our essential physical being and to resanctify that
which has come to appear mundane. Rather than framing religion as
an escape from this world, Plate argues for a 'soul craft' grounded
in the fundamental and ongoing need to rebind our ideas and our
language to our bodies as we rebind our bodies to the body of
world."
--Kathleen J. Graber, author of The Eternal City: Poems
"Contemporary debates concerning belief tend to focus on
conflicting ideas at the expense of the practical ways religious
traditions are actually lived by billions around the world. A
History of Religion in 51/2 Objects bucks this trend by grounding
its lofty and contentious subject in the sounds, smells, textures,
and tastes through which faith has always been experienced. With
wit and verve, S. Brent Plate's groundbreaking history suggests
that understanding religion begins not with our souls, but with our
bodies."
--Peter Manseau, author of Vows "A deft, delightful incantation in
praise of religion's sensual grounding in the elemental things of
earth, Plate's work restores the link between the spiritual and
material throughout the world's religious traditions. Traversing
the contemporary and the ancient, the local and the global, this
book carries the reader home to the body, the senses, and the soul.
Plate's elegant and insightful prose illuminates the creative human
activities that make religion ordinary, ubiquitous, and powerfully
important. A joy to read, one lingers in this book's scent long
after turning the last page."
--Rebecca Ann Parker, co-author of Saving Paradise
"Brent Plate's A History of Religion in 51/2 Objects is a treasure.
A book written by a scholar of religion that confuses as it
clarifies, obscures as it illuminates, and challenges as it
reassures; it takes an innovative approach to thinking about
religion, feeling it in our lives, and highlighting its downright
sensational aspects as a material, and spiritual, reality. A great
joy to read."
--Gary Laderman, author of Sacred Matters
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