Review: The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Cultural and Cognitive Aesthetics of Religion

Abstract

The wide range of approaches gathered in this volume makes it indispensable for studying how exactly the much-evoked forces and agencies of sensuality, matter and affect actually affect bodies. It has been often and repeatedly claimed that objects have agency, that religion might be seen as a flow of affective powers through bodies (see, for instance, Donovan O. Schaefer’s book on Religious Affects) – but the question remains open what that would exactly mean. In all their polyphony and discontinuity, the contributions to this volume give much-needed answers to such questions, gained from philological and ethnographic as well as from neuroscientific studies. Filling a lot of gaps, many new questions rise, and the insights into the diverse methods and processes of data collection are useful for ongoing and upcoming studies within the still emerging field of the Aesthetics of Religion.