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...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Lorea, Carola Erika 1987- (Author) ; Mahadev, Neena (Author) ; Lang, Natalie (Author) ; Chen, Ningning (Author)
Format: Electronic Article
Language:English
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Published: Routledge 2022
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
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Description
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.
ISSN:1096-1151
Contains:Enthalten in: Religion
Persistent identifiers:DOI: 10.1080/0048721X.2022.2061701