Religion and the COVID-19 pandemic: mediating presence and distance
This introduction opens a collection of seven articles which investigate how religious communities negotiate demands for physical distance induced by governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in accord with their religious and spiritual aspirations to establish presence and togetherness. Groun...
| Authors: | ; ; ; |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Routledge
2022
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| In: |
Religion
Year: 2022, Volume: 52, Issue: 2, Pages: 177-198 |
| Standardized Subjects / Keyword chains: | B
COVID-19 (Disease)
/ Pandemic
/ Religious practice
/ Religious community
/ Sensuality
/ Nearness
/ Distance
/ New media
|
| IxTheo Classification: | AD Sociology of religion; religious policy AG Religious life; material religion TK Recent history ZG Media studies; Digital media; Communication studies |
| Further subjects: | B
ritual temporality
B religion and senses B religion and media B Sacred Space B innovative religiosities B pandemic ritual B Mediation B Covid-19 Pandemic |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (kostenfrei) |
| Summary: | This introduction opens a collection of seven articles which investigate how religious communities negotiate demands for physical distance induced by governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in accord with their religious and spiritual aspirations to establish presence and togetherness. Grounded in ethnography and media analysis, our contributors offer studies on Pentecostal healing, Mormon eschatology, Hindu diasporic rituals, Chinese spirit mediums, the virtual Burning Man festival, Sufi sonic meditations, and televised Shia Muslim mourning. These studies collectively demonstrate that in pandemic rituals (1) Media are reflexive and enchanted; (2) The religious sensorium is sticky and lingers in embodied and mnemonic ways even under new circumstances of mediation; (3) Space and time emerge as modular, transposable, condensed, yet expanding. Ritual innovations can provoke new kinds of mediations, sensory engagements, and temporal-spatial arrangements, while revealing continuities with pre-pandemic cosmologies, theologies, liturgies, and social hierarchies, and relying on memories of previous ritual sensory experiences. |
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| ISSN: | 1096-1151 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1080/0048721X.2022.2061701 |