THE AESTHETICS OF CROSSING:

EXPERIENCING THE BEYOND IN ABRAHAMIC TRADITIONS

International conference, Utrecht University, 19-21 March 2015

CONFERENCE BOOKLET




Contents
Introduction ........................................................................................................................................................................... 5

Programme ............................................................................................................................................................................. 6

Thursday 19th March ........................................................................................................................ 6

Friday 20th March ............................................................................................................................. 7

Saturday 21st March ......................................................................................................................... 9

Practical Information ...................................................................................................................................................... 11

Airport transfer and directions ..................................................................................................... 11

From Utrecht Central Station to the conference venue ............................................................................. 11

Map of the city centre of Utrecht ................................................................................................... 12

Conference location ........................................................................................................................ 13

Internet access ................................................................................................................................ 13

Conference dinner location ........................................................................................................... 13

Printing ........................................................................................................................................... 13

Help / Emergency ........................................................................................................................... 13

Hotel locations ................................................................................................................................ 13

Ground floor at Zaalverhuur 7 .............................................................................................................................. 14

First floor at Zaalverhuur 7 .................................................................................................................................... 14

Second floor at Zaalverhuur 7 ............................................................................................................................... 15

Abstracts Keynote Lectures ......................................................................................................................................... 16

Hans Belting: Crossing cultural borders: Migrating images between East and West ............... 16

Christian Lange: What no eye has seen? Crossing into the otherworld in Islamic traditions .. 16

Lindsay Jones: From the Pillar of Death to the Cross of Miracles: Mentalist assumptions and
materialist correctives in Mitla, Oaxaca, Mexico .......................................................................... 17

Abstracts Session Lectures ........................................................................................................................................... 18

Day 1 (Thursday 19th March) ............................................................................................................. 18

Session 1: Ingestion .................................................................................................................................................... 18

Day 2 (Friday 20th March) .................................................................................................................. 20

Session 2A: Seeing ....................................................................................................................................................... 20

Session 2B: Eros ........................................................................................................................................................... 23

Session 3A: Emotions ................................................................................................................................................ 24

Session 3B: Material 1 ............................................................................................................................................... 27

Day 3 (Saturday 21st March) ............................................................................................................... 29

Session 4A: Material 2 ............................................................................................................................................... 29

Session 4B: Hearing .................................................................................................................................................... 33

Introduction
The aesthetics of crossing: Experiencing the beyond in Abrahamic traditions is a three-day,
interdisciplinary, international conference dedicated to studying the manifold ways in which the
body experiences and, at times, traverses the perceived divide between the sacred and the profane.
Because religious boundaries are not necessarily registered or crossed by the body in its entirety but
by one or a number of its senses, the conference is structured around the bodys senses, including
the inner, more incorporeal ones such as the faculty of the imagination. The conference seeks: (a) to
produce insights, drawn from the study of primary body-related data (texts, images, objects,
practices, etc.), into how the body is the vehicle and agent of religious boundary-crossing; (b) to
examine how such conceptualizations and uses of the body are both affirmed and contested within
religious and secular traditions; and (c) to locate the study of the body and its boundary-crossing
potential in recent disciplinary transformations in the study of religion across the Humanities.

The aesthetics of crossing: experiencing the beyond in Abrahamic traditions marks the end of a
series of scholarly consultations organized within the framework of HHIT (The here and the
hereafter in Islamic traditions), a four-year research project funded by the European Research
Council (project no. 263308) and hosted at Utrecht University (http://hhit.wp.hum.uu.nl/). HHIT
has been primarily invested in studying Muslim cosmologies and imaginaries, seeking to trace and
locate the various boundaries, often unstable and permeable, that divide this world from the
otherworld in a variety of Islamic religious discourses and practices. This conference seeks to
broaden the work of HHIT in several directions, and to stimulate discussion across disciplines such
as Islamic Studies, Religious Studies, Anthropology, Literature, History of Art, and others.

Programme

Thursday 19th March

2-3pm: REGISTRATION, COFFEE & TEA
WELCOME (3-3:05): Martha Frederiks (Dpt. Philosophy and Religious Studies, UU)
INTRODUCTION (3:05-3:15pm): Christian Lange & Simon OMeara

KEYNOTE 1 (3:15-4pm):
Hans Belting:
Crossing cultural borders: Migrating images between East and West

SESSION 1 (4:15-6:15pm): Ingestion
INGESTION
Chair: Birgit Meyer
4:15- Thomas Arentzen (Lund University): A matter of taste: Salvation as
4:45pm gustation in Early Christian poetry
4:45- Mark Soileau (Artuklu University): Tasting the moment: Gustatory
5:15pm revelation in the Bektashi ritual meal
5:15- Greg Schmidt Goering (University of Virginia): Gustatory aesthetics in the
5:45pm Jewish wisdom tradition
5:45- Paul L. Heck (Georgetown University): The descent of Gods sakna onto
6:15pm the hearts of believers: Bodily implications

RECEPTION (6:15-7:15pm, drinks and snacks)

Friday 20th March

9:15-9:30am: REGISTRATION

KEYNOTE 2 (9:30-10:15am):
Christian Lange:
What no eye has seen? Crossing into the otherworld in Islamic traditions

10:15-10:30am: COFFEE & TEA

SESSION 2 (10:30am-12:45pm): Seeing / Eros (parallel session)
SEEING (Room: Kerkzaal) EROS (Room: Huiskamer)
Chair: Christian Lange Chair: Eric Ottenheijm
10:30-11 Angelika Brodersen Birgit Krawietz (Berlin Free
am (Ruhruniversitt Bochum): University): Muscular Islam with
Transgressing the limits: Al-Jls Shamanistic features: The many
Dream layers of Turkish oil wrestling
11- Pieter Coppens (Utrecht Peter-Ben Smit (Utrecht University):
11:30am University): Approaching God and An explosion of peace: Body, ritual,
paradise through the senses: and the beyond in the Kiss of Peace
Sufism between corporeality and
spirituality
11:30- SHORT BREAK SHORT BREAK
11:45am
11:45am- Yousef Casewit (American Marcel Poorthuis (Tilburg School of
12:15pm University of Sharjah): Ibn Catholic Theology): Cabbala,
Barrajn and the Andalusian eroticism, and the primacy of touch
mutabirn
12:15- Benedikt Pontzen (Berlin Free Martien Halvorson-Taylor
12:45pm University): On seeing God and (University of Virginia): Ecstasy and
its ambiguities: Religious claims imagination in the Song of Songs
and counterclaims among Muslims
in Asante, Ghana

LUNCH (12:45-2pm)

SESSION 3 (2pm-5pm): Material 1 / Emotions (parallel session)

MATERIAL 1 (Kerkzaal)
Chair: Nico Landman
2- Annalisa Butticci (Utrecht
2:30pm University): Mediating and re-
mediating divine presence:
Raphaels Transfiguration of Christ
and the African Pentecostal
religious imagination
2:30- Simon OMeara (School of Oriental
3pm and African Studies), A cross at
Mecca: Circling the Kaba
3- Markus Balkenhol (Utrecht
3:30pm University): The cross-thing:
Experiencing beyond Abrahamic
traditions
EMOTIONS (Huiskamer)
Chair: Marcel Poorthuis
Julia Schwartzmann (Western Galilee
College): He smells and judges: Can
the sense of smell be an instrument of
justice?
Louise Lawrence (University of
Exeter): Putrid smells and the
anatomy of disgust in biblical
traditions
Brenna Moore (Fordham University):
A Friend to ravish souls: Emotion,
intimacy, and the rhetoric of solitude
in modern French Catholicism

3:30- COFFEE & TEA BREAK COFFEE & TEA BREAK

4pm

4- Ahmad Sukkar (Oxford Centre for Monique Scheer (University of
4:30pm Islamic Studies): Crossing Tbingen): Cross my heart: Emotions
boundaries between the body, as mediating practices in Protestant
space and architecture in the Christianities
Islamic tradition: On Abd al-Ghan
al-Nbuluss Mift al-Fut (The
Key of Openings)
4:30- (Cancellation) Anne-Marie Korte (Utrecht
5pm University): Greetings from beyond
the grave: Reconceptualising life after
death in contemporary miracle
stories

RECEPTION (6:30-7:30pm)
Venue: Fundatie van Renswoude, Agnietenstraat 5 (Utrecht city centre)
Music ensemble Maqam

followed by CONFERENCE DINNER (7:30pm-)

Saturday 21st March

KEYNOTE 3 (9-9:45am):
Lindsay Jones:
From the Pillar of Death to the Cross of Miracles: Mentalist assumptions and materialist
Correctives in Mitla, Oaxaca, Mexico

9:45-10am: COFFEE & TEA

SESSION 4 (10am-12:45pm): Material 2 / Hearing (parallel session)
MATERIAL 2 (Kerkzaal) HEARING (Huiskamer)
Chair: Simon OMeara Chair: Martha Frederiks
10- Sonja Luehrmann (Simon Fraser Daniel Becerra (Duke University):
10:30am University): Moulded imaginaries: Origen and the spoken word
Iconographic media as an
environment of canonical
perception
10:30- Glenn Peers (University of Texas at Tala Jarjour (University of Notre
11am Austin): The matter of crossing Dame): Sound, place, and affective
beyond (and back) in the manifestations of the aesthetic in
Byzantine World Syriac chant
11am- Frank J. Korom (Boston Scott Kugle (Emory University): A
11:30pm University): Multi-sensorial crooked cap marks the right way to
crossings in a contemporary Sufi pray: Embodying love in Qawwali
community
11:30- COFFEE & TEA BREAK COFFE & TEA BREAK
11:45am
11:45am- Anne E. Lester (University of Isaac Weiner (The Ohio State
12:15pm Colorado at Boulder): Beholding University): Soundmapping religious
the body of Christ: Relics, boundaries: Reflections on an
translation and the revelation of emerging methodology
religious truth in the aftermath of

the Fourth Crusade

12:15- Janneke Raaimakers and Jelle Anderson Blanton (Max Planck
12:45pm Visser (Utrecht University): Seeing Institute): The point of contact: Radio
the unseen God: Worship of visible prayers and the apparatus of belief
things in the Carolingian
period/early Middle Ages?

CONCLUDING REFLECTIONS (12:45-1pm): Birgit Meyer

FAREWELL & LUNCH (ends ca. 2:30pm)

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Guest registration fee: 15 (7,50 for students), to be paid in cash at registration.
For further information, please contact aestheticsofcrossing@gmail.com

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Practical Information
Airport transfer and directions
Most of you will enter the Netherlands via Schiphol airport, and we ask that you buy your own
return Schiphol to Utrecht (Utrecht Centraal) tickets. Make sure to avoid the tickets dispensers
that are marked with OV - just use the regular yellow ticket machines (the instructions are in
English and Dutch), or go to the ticket counter in Schiphol, in both cases also requesting a
receipt. A return ticket from Schiphol to Utrecht is currently worth 19 . At registration on
Thursday morning, conference speakers will be be reimbursed with 19 in cash, but they will
still have to send in the used train tickets for our book-keeping. If you are coming from another
station in Holland, the same principle also applies. The website of the Dutch railway system
provides you with timetables and ticket prices: www.ns.nl. Trains from Schiphol to Utrecht leave
ca. every 15 min.

From Utrecht Central Station to the conference venue

To reach the conference venue (Zaalverhuur 7, Boothstraat 7, 3512 BT Utrecht, +31 30 751
6113) from Utrecht Central Station (Utrecht Centraal) you can take a five-minute taxi or bus
ride, or a fifteen-minute walk. Leave the train station on the city centre side by taking the stairs
down. You can take the following buses:
! Bus 2 (to Museumkwartier)
! Bus 5 (to Voordorp)
! Bus 8 (to Wilhelminapark)
! Bus 28 (to P+R de Uithof)

You need to get off at bus stop Janskerkhof (third stop). Cross the bus lane and then cross the
square behind the church, turning slightly to the left to find the Boothstraat (see map below),
where the conference venue is located at number 7. For buses in Utrecht, you can consult the
website www.9292ov.nl for information about timetables. If youre light on luggage and prefer
to walk (15 minutes), exit the station toward shopping centre Hoog Catherijne and walk towards
the Vredenburg exit. At the end, take the escalators down and leave the building. Turn left and
cross the square, then turn right on Vredenburg and it is a straight shot to the conference venue,
although the name of the street will change to Lange Viestraat, then Vieburg, then Lange
Jansstraat, and then Janskerkhof. When you see the Janskerk (Church of St. John), pass it on the
left and you will find the Boothstraat on your left.

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Map of the city centre of Utrecht

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Conference location
The conference will take place in the centre of Utrecht at Zaalverhuur7 close to the University
buildings. Zaalverhuur7 is an inspiring location right in the heart of the city, an authentic church
building from 1900 with rooms for small as well as large groups. The rooms have a modern
design with just a hint of nostalgia. By making use of an old church in a sustainable way
Zaalverhuur aims to make a valuable contribution to society. At Zaalverhuur7 they like to work
with local and global suppliers who have a lot of love for their product. Part of the profit goes to
an orphanage in Haiti, among other things. For more information about the Zaalverhuur7 and
their philosophy, please visit their website: www.zaalverhuur7.nl/English

Internet access
Utrecht University provides WiFi that can be accessed through the service of Eduroam. Eduroam
is a secure, world-wide roaming access service developed for the international research and
education community. This has to be issued in advance at your home institution.

If your own institution does not make use of Eduroam, you can use the UU-visitor network. No
further registration is required. On opening a web browser and after accepting the terms of
use the internet connection will become available.

Conference dinner location

The conference dinner on Friday 20th March will take place in the Fundatie van Renswoude,
located on Agnietenstraat 5, within walking distance (ca. 10-15 min.) of the conference location.
This eighteenth century building was commissioned by the foundation that is its namesake. The
foundation was founded in 1754 when Maria Duyst van Voorhout, Vrijvrouwe van Renswoude in
her will, designated a large sum to the welfare of orphans. For more information on the venue in
Dutch, consult the website of the foundation at: www.fundatievanrenswoude-utrecht.nl.

Printing
When you need printing facilities there is a copy centre (MultiCopy) close to the conference
venue at Drift 5. To be able to print here, you need to deliver your files in pdf via e-mail or at a
flash disk.

Help / Emergency
The conference committee will be available to answer all your questions during the conference
at the registration desk in the hallway. You can also contact the conference assistant, Sascha
Stans, by phone at +31-6-43026058. In case of emergency, the Dutch emergency number is 112.

Hotel locations
The various hotels, booked for some of the participants of the conference, are all located on
walking distance of the conference location. Bookings have been made at the following hotels:

NH Hotel Centre Utrecht, Janskerkhof 10

Mother Goose Hotel, Ganzenmarkt 26
Hotel Dom, Domstraat 4
Court Hotel City Centre Utrecht, Korte Nieuwestraat 14

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M ap of the conference location

Ground floor

stairs to the balcony

huiskamer (living room)

podium

kerkzaal (church hall)

Boothstraat 7
entrance
central hall +

main
main stairs

office
toilets
kitchen

First floor

balcony

kerkzaal attic stairs

(church hall)

main stairs

balcony

Beg

bovenkamer (upstairs
room)

Toilet

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Second floor

grote zolder
(large attic room)

zoldertrap
(attic stairs)

zoldertrap
(attic stairs)

kleine zolder
(small attic room)

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Abstracts Keynote Lectures

Hans Belting: Crossing cultural borders: Migrating images between East and West

The new interest in the study of images which today has expanded across the Humanities invites us
to return to Aby Warburgs role in the development of an all-embracing iconology, which he
institutionalized with his Hamburg library in 1920. Though an art historian by formation, he carried
his research beyond the frontiers of art and explained images as an expression of what we call
culture. This approach encourages us to reconsider his studies in the face of an expanded global
world in which we are expected to respond to the presence of non-Western cultures. His questions
keep their energy when we ask them after the encounter of other cultures that entered the game. In
the words of Ernst Cassirer, who in Warburgs time taught philosophy at Hamburg University, the
Warburg library was conceived not as a collection of books but rather as a collection of problems
whose solution was to remain a never ending task. Under his guidance, I will further reopen the
discussion of images and image migration in Muslim cultures vis--vis China and Europe.

Christian Lange: What no eye has seen? Crossing into the otherworld in Islamic traditions

In Islamic Studies, there is to date no notable tradition of studying the senses, be it in Islamic
philosophy, theology, medicine, or other cultural, social or political appropriations of the human
sensorium. Scholars of Islam are light years away from producing synthetic, intersensory accounts
of the history of the senses in Islam, such as have been written over the past decades by scholars
studying the sensory history of the West. Also studies of the cultural meaning(s) of single senses in
Islam are exceedingly rare. In this lecture, I shall attempt to sketch a history of the senses in
premodern Arab-Muslim culture by examining narratives about sensory crossings toward the
otherworld (al-khira), as well as tracing the teleographies, to use Thomas Tweeds term, that
buttress them. My material is primarily drawn from the geographical literature, from the corpus of
Sufi writings, but also and importantly, from mainstream hadith, both in the Sunni and the Shii
tradition.
Such an endeavor requires us, first, to speak about transcendentalism, a current of thought
in Islam that is particularly robust in systematic theology (kalm) but also resonates strongly in the
traditionist literature, as for example in the well-known divine saying (adth quds) that I have
prepared for my servants [in the otherworld] that which no eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind
has conceived. The unfathomability of God and, by extension, of the otherworld has long
dominated scholarly accounts of the history of religious thought in Islam, whether written by
Muslim or by Western scholars. As I argue, this dominant scholarly narrative should be reassessed in
the light of the manifold ways in which Islamic religious literature makes the otherworld accessible
to the senses. In the hadith and the exegetical literature, the prophet Muhammad is repeatedly said
to have seen, heard and tasted the otherworld, on various occasions. These hadiths seem to have
given rise to more general formulations of what my be called sensory teleographies, speculations
about the general possibility of perceiving the otherworld through the bodily senses. One sees
intriguing differences, however, in the relative weight bestowed on specific senses in such
teleographies. Although the topic is vast, I shall try to survey the dominant types, and conclude with
a discussion of the ratio of senses that emerges from such a survey.

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Lindsay Jones: From the Pillar of Death to the Cross of Miracles: Mentalist assumptions and
materialist correctives in Mitla, Oaxaca, Mexico

This presentation opens with a broadly theoretically discussion that, first, visits recent comments
by Birgit Meyer and others advocating for a material approach to religion, which might supplant
the stubborn resilience of a mentalist approach to religion; and then, second, revisits some of the
ways that insights and recommendations about a new materialism might impact upon the study
and interpretation of Mesoamerican ruins such as Teotihuacn, Chichn Itz or Monte Albn.
The discussion then turns to consideration of two material objects in the Mitla region of
Oaxaca in southern Mexico: A 1000-year-old stone column, colloquially known as the Pillar of
Death, and a 100-year-old stone cross that is nowadays called the Cross of Miracles. Though both
were originally constructed as utilitarian featuresone a pre-Columbian support post and the other
an early 20th-century surveyors markerboth come to be highly revered monuments to which
various communities of indigenous and mestizo Catholics make occasional visits and annual
pilgrimages. Though they are located about five miles apart and might seem to be unrelated, a case
will be made that the still-growing notoriety of the Cross of Miracles owes in large part to the
shifting fortunes of the Column of Death in connection with the complex relations among
indigenous religion, Catholicism and tourism.

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Abstracts Session Lectures

Day 1 (Thursday 19 th March)
Session 1: Ingestion

Thomas Arentzen (Lund University), A matter of taste: Salvation as gustation in Early
Christian poetry
Late Antiquity saw the emergence of a particular form of religious poetry in the Eastern
Mediterranean: long stanzaic and metrical songs whose purpose was to vivify Scriptural or
mythical stories in epic and/or dramatic form. A Jewish type is called piyyut; Syriac and Greek
Christian ones are called madrasha and kontakion respectively. These songs addressed not the
spiritual elite, but were sung during popular liturgical services.
The key poet of the kontakion genre is Romanos the Melodist (+ ca 560). He came from
Syrian areas but lived and worked in Constantinople. To him, religious experience arises not so
much from noetic contemplation as from embodied desire. His universe appoints a central
position to the fervently yearning self, with its hunger and its thirst, and the human constitution
seems always to be erotically directed towards crossings into the sacred. Seeing and hearing,
smelling and tasting, and longing for tactile encounters are all basic features of the devotional
life that Romanos imagines.
The present paper focuses on his language of tastes, of eating and drinking, of anticipated
meals and enjoyable feasts. I shall explore not only what the different tastes signify in the texts,
but also how a selection of characters approaches food and drink with various hues of desire in
Romanoss poetry. Their longing, I argue, is meant to arouse a similar longing in the listener, as
flavors intersect with rich patterns of gustatory expectations and excitement. The Virgins
breast-milk converges with congregational appetite, for instance, and a harlot in love exhibits a
ravenous craving for Jesus and his bread. Cutting a breach between the untasteful and that
which is becoming, Romanos attempts to serve religious discernment in the sensory realm.
Hence the faithful, with their desires and needs, may be depicted in true colors, as he says, by
the Samaritan Woman and her unquenchable thirst for sweet water.

Mark Soileau (Artuklu University), Tasting the moment: Gustatory revelation in the
Bektashi ritual meal
The world is experienced through the senses and the perceptions they spark. What culture, and
religion in particular, does is to organize particular patterns for living in the world and present
them to its adherents, through various means, so that they experience the world in those
particular ways. This involves directing the senses and then the perceptions of adherents of the
culture. The most explicit means that religion employs to carry out this task is ritual, which
focuses the attention of participants on its particular notion of the sacred and leads them to
experience it actively, thus allowing for the experience of crossing the boundary between the
profane and the sacred. Seeing, hearing, touching and smelling are frequently employed in ritual,
but it is only with the inclusion of taste that a ritual reaches full synaesthesia. Thus, the
aesthetically fullest type of ritual is the ritual meal.
An especially illustrative ritual meal is that of the Bektashi dervish order, a highly
ritualistic Sufi tradition which places great symbolic emphasis on the juxtaposition between the
material and the spiritual, microcosm and macrocosm, the outside and the inside. These themes
are explored in the ritual meal known as the sofra, in which the foods and drinks ingested, table
manners, and the processes of ingestion and digestion themselves are charged with Bektashi
significance through discursive means, and actualized through physical practice. At the center of
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this ritual process is the sense of taste, which marks the moment i.e., the temporal point of
contact between the intended reality and the perceiving self, and thus the initiation of the
experience of this reality. The moment, however, is fleeting, so it has to be captured, and the
sofra provides the means for capturing and retaining the elusive moment, initially through the
sense of taste and ultimately through the processes of ingestion and digestion. The moment thus
marks the crossing from the outside to the inside. Through the process of discursively imbuing
physical comestibles with cultural information and offering them to participants to taste them,
the cultural information is experienced by participants. The experience of the information itself
is indirect, but through the medium of physical foodstuffs and actual ingestion, a direct reality is
approached, and this is the reality that Bektashis seek.
Through an analysis of the practices surrounding the ingestion of food and drink in the
Bektashi sofra, this paper will show how the attempt is made to formulate and to realize in
participants an aesthetics of experiencing and internalizing mystical truths.

Greg Schmidt Goering (University of Virginia), Gustatory aesthetics in the Jewish
wisdom tradition
In this paper, I explore gustation in ancient Jewish wisdom literature. I argue that taste
frequently marks the reception, retention, and generation of wisdom and folly. As a result,
gustatory processes create the self, denote identity, and legitimate social distinctions.
In general, Jewish sages sought to train their students palates in binary terms, directing
them toward sweet tastes and away from bitter ones. The sweet-bitter dichotomy traversed
both the literal and the figurative levels by means of the conceptual metaphor Words are Food.
Conceived as food, words enter a persons mouth and accumulate in the belly. Once housed in
the stomach, these food-words may then be reproduced as speech, whence they become food for
anothers consumption.
This imagined cycle, I argue, results in two complementary models. First, you are what
you eat. Since food-words descend to the belly, taste plays a crucial role in self-formation.
Eating sweet words produces a wise self; consuming bitter words results in a foolish self. This
model accentuates the bodily nature of gustation, since humans necessarily become mixed with
what they taste. Second, you eat what you are. In other words, the type of food-words a person
eats corresponds to the category to which he belongs: fools consume bitter food-words, while
the wise adhere to a strict diet of sweets. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieus analysis of the sense of
taste and cultural aesthetics, I show how taste marks social distinctions in the sapiential
tradition. By observing what people eat, what kinds of speech they consume, one can distinguish
types of persons. Because of these formative and distinguishing roles of gustation, Jewish sages
sought to inculcate wisdom by educating their pupils sense of taste.
This study of gustation illumines the mouths significance in Jewish wisdom literature as
a gateway between the bodys interior and exterior. In the imaginative world constructed by the
sages, the mouth functions both as a portal through which a person consumes wisdom and
incorporates it into his body and as a gate which governs whether previously ingested words are
retained in the body or released to the outside. At this key breach in the boundary of the self sits
the sense of taste. As arbiter of sweet and bitter, wise and foolish, the sense of taste serves a
crucial evaluative role. As an organ of judgment, the tongue determines what enters and exits
the body, controlling the flux across the boundary of the body and thereby playing a central role
in determining what kind of self the person becomes. My investigation of the way sages
inculcated wisdom through educating the sense of taste, therefore, points to the embodied, not
merely cognitive, nature of wisdom in the Jewish sapiential tradition. For the untutored and the
wise person alike, taste facilitates the bodily crossing of the rocky moral terrain between
wisdom and folly.

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Paul L. Heck (Georgetown University), The descent of Gods sakna onto the hearts of
believers: Bodily implications
In his well-known work on ethics (Madrij al-Slikn), Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350) includes
a chapter on sakna, which is something that God sends down onto the hearts of believers,
bringing about tranquility in time of anxiety. In describing it, he speaks of the effect that it has on
the body of the recipient. It quiets the limbs. So what is this sakna that descends from God, is
described as a divine gift (mawhiba) rather than something one might earn or cause (maksiba),
and impacts the body?
I propose to discuss the concept of sakna in Islam especially in relation to its bodily
implications. First, I will briefly outline the history of the concept from the Quran and Hadith
(including its relation to the appearance of angels) and also early reports (e.g. in al-Azraqi)
where it is mentioned as having a physical manifestation and a special relation to the Kaba in
Mecca. Second, I will discuss the way the concept features in works on ethics especially in circles
of Sufism (e.g. al-Hakim al-Tirmidhi and Abdallah al-Ansari), particularly in relation to the
spiritual senses (which is reflected in terms such as laif and asrr, as I will briefly explain).
Third, I will focus on the bodily implications of the descent of Gods sakna onto individuals,
including the impact it has on the way one speaks (i.e. on the tongue) and the way in which it
works to heal ailments both bodily and psychological (with examples from both past and
present). Finally, I will (tentatively) note functional parallels to sakna in the Latin West,
particularly in relation to writings on spiritual senses (affectus).
There have been occasional studies on the concept of sakna at least since the article by
Ignaz Goldziher on the topic. However, these studies have not treated the topic in relation to the
focuses of this conference. Moreover, to my knowledge, no critical study has treated the way in
which sakna is appropriated by Muslims today. In particular, under what circumstances are the
sakna verses in the Quran recited? Are they recited for psychological purposes (e.g. to dispel
anxiety) or is there also expectation that recitation of these verses has bodily impact (e.g. on
ones health).

Day 2 (Friday 20 th March)
Session 2A: Seeing

Angelika Brodersen (Ruhruniversitt Bochum), Transgressing the limits: Al-Jls Dream
In the 11th chapter of his ar Mukilt al-Futht al-makkya, Abd al-Karm al-Jl (died 832/1428)
deals with a couple of intermediate worlds (barzi) situated between different realms, e.g. between
body and (human) mind, content and form, this world and the hereafter. Only humans able to see
into the bodily and also the spiritual worlds can gain insight into these barzi. Hence, they are
capable to actualize entities in such an intermediate world by their power of volition.
In order to support this theory, al-Jl refers to a personal experience he went through
during a journey in Yemen. Interestingly, this was not a real incident in a common sense, but a
dream, i.e. a kind of intermediate world in itself. In this dream, al-Jl watched a woman who had
died. Her face was getting dark, because she faced hell. In al-Jls early childhood, this woman had
been very considerate to him, therefore in his dream he coated hell for her by the appearance of
paradise and told her to look at this. Thereupon the darkness vanished from her face, and it became
bright and shining.
It is not crucial if this dream is a really experienced one, or if al-Jl constructed it. It is
conceivable that he chose this possibility as a kind of reassurance against offenses from orthodox
circles. What is significant is its function in the wider context. For al-Jl uses this report to illustrate
mans facility to reach an intermediate world between the here and now and the hereafter, even to
affect people who did already transgress the border to the other world, by means of his imagination.

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Thus, his dream is not merely an argument for the existence of intermediate worlds. It rather
supports mans ability to actualize desired entities in one of these worlds by his mind. But, as al-Jl
emphasizes, only especially gifted people dispose of this faculty.
In the course of my contribution I want to demonstrate how al-Jl, leaning on Ibn al-Arabs
cosmology, describes the intermediate worlds as determined by two diametrically opposed realms,
respectively, and how he represents human mind and imagination as means to cross the borders
between different levels of existence, including the otherworldly form.

Pieter Coppens (Utrecht University), Approaching God and paradise through the senses:
Sufism between corporeality and spirituality
This paper discusses early Sufi ideas on the nature of perception of God and the delights of Paradise
with the senses in this world and the otherworld. Relying on a score of scriptural sources from the
formative period of Sufism, I will argue that a this-worldly vision (ruya, nar, mushhada) or
audition (sam, munjt) of God, or a taste (dhawq, am) of Paradise were generally considered a
foretaste of the enjoyments of Paradise and thus considered to be different and less complete than
otherworldly perceptions. Furthermore I claim that gradually a concept was developed similar to
the spiritual senses in Christianity, to avoid anthropomorphism, thus legitimizing these claimed
perceptions within the broader Islamic tradition.
In early Islamic thought not only in the proto-Sufi circles of zuhhd, but also in more
theologically inclined trends - it was not uncommon to claim an anthropomorphically formulated
sensual experience of God or Paradise: God had a color and a taste, He could be seen in the form of
a young, beardless boy, He could be heard and even touched; the fruits of Paradise could be eaten in
this world, the ur al-ayn could be embraced. Some of these early ideas have even survived in
adth literature. Many of these early imaginaries, I argue, survived in a different form in the
upcoming Sufi trend. Within Sufism they were made acceptable to the current Ashar and
Traditionist mainstream by mystifying and thus de-anthropomorphizing their original
understandings. The anthropomorphic tension around the issue of the vision of God, for example,
was solved by the concept of the eye of the heart (ayn al-qalb), or by proposing a visio dei through
creation. Special attention will be paid to modes of sensual perception of God and Paradise in the
works of Rzbihn al-Baql, and how these are related to earlier Islamic discussions on the matter.

Yousef Casewit (American University of Sharjah), Ibn Barrajn and the Andalusian
mutabirn
Ab al-akam Ibn Barrajn (d. 536/1141) was hailed as the al-Ghazali of al-Andalus for good
reason. He authored the most important Andalusian works of mystical Qurn commentary during
the intellectually formative 6th/12th century, leaving an indelible mark on later generations of
Muslim scholars. Having lived at the end of the Almoravid dynasty (r. 454-541/1062-1147), this
pioneering figure represents a particularly unknown yet crucial period of cosmological thought in
Andalusia, and links the early mystical tradition of Ibn Masarra (d. 319/931) with that of Ibn al-
Arab (d. 637/1240). Despite his unmistakable significance both politically and in the formation of
Sufism, theology, and other religious sciences of the Muslim West, Ibn Barrajn has been almost
completely neglected by modern scholarship.
Ibn Barrajn prided himself in being a Mutabir, a Contemplatoror more literally, an
undertaker of the crossover (ibra) into the unseen world. This paper will explore his unique
understanding of the ibra by analyzing his hierarchical symbology, which is closely tied to Qurnic
verses and adth, and which relates natural phenomena as contemplative passageways into the
unseen world. Based on my recently completed critical edition of his 1200-page Qurn exegesis
entitled al-ikma bi-akm al- ibra, this paper will highlight two key thematic strands of Ibn
Barrajans work. The first, is his concept of divine symbols (yt kha), in which certain natural
phenomena, for instance the sun and the moon, exclusively manifest Gods presence. Alongside

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these uniquely divine self-disclosures, the natural world contains a second category of signs that are
ontologically rooted in celestial or infernal states, and reflect phenomena such as the archetypal
day, heavenly trees, or infernal beings. This twofold distinction within Ibn Barrajans symbology of
the natural world is so central to his thought that the may be described as a guidebook to
envisioning the cosmos as a theater of these two types of otherworldly manifestations. This paper
will emphasize how these intellectual contributions by Ibn Barrajn were incorporated into Ibn al-
Arabs al-Futt al- makkiyya, and reinforced the centrality of the natural world as an opening
unto the supernatural in Sufi cosmology.

Benedikt Pontzen (Berlin Free University), On seeing God and its ambiguities: Religious
claims and counterclaims among Muslims in Asante, Ghana
According to the adth Jibrl, one has reached perfection in worshipping God if one worships Him
as if one sees Him. In the zongos, Muslim wards in Asante, Ghana, where I have carried out
anthropological fieldwork between 2011 and 2013, I have come across several Islamic scholars
(Asante Twi: malams) who claimed that they have actually achieved this. Through their tarbiya
(Arabic: spiritual training) and dhikr (Arabic: remembrance of Allh), they have reached a state of
unification with the divine (Arabic: marifa) and thereby acquired the faculty of seeing God and His
workings in the world, as several of my interlocutors put it.
In my paper, I portray two such malams, sketch out their bodily cum spiritual practices,
and open a window on their narrations on these to convey a conjectural idea of how they come to
see God and lay claims to this faculty within their communities. However, these claims are heavily
contested among Muslims in the zongos and refuted by several malams who perceive and openly
criticize them as kufr (Arabic: disbelief). Commonly, it is members of the Tijaniyya, a Sufi group,
who lay claim to this faculty; and they find themselves exposed to harsh critiques by the Sunna, a
group of Salafi-/ Wahhabi-oriented reformers. Both sides of this ongoing discourse draw on the
same Islamic scriptures to found their claims and counterclaims, making divergent senses of and
with them. In tracing these, I discuss how we might reach a tentative understanding of these claims
and their critique.
In describing and analyzing how these malams come to see God, I wish to shed some light
on the senses they make of and with their religious practices and experiences and on how they
found these on a specific understanding of their religious tradition. As these malams come to
embody the divine in their being, the notion of the body is central to an understanding of this
process. Additionally, we need to reconsider our analytic notion of belief if we wish to come to an
explanatory understanding of this phenomenon. Nevertheless, we need to acknowledge the limits of
our scientific reach and understanding along with the limits of our participation in the lifeworlds of
others.
As I argue, our understanding of this phenomenon has to remain tentative, as seeing God
is beyond the means of language and irreducible to a narrative rendering of the event unless
you make it for yourself, as one of my interlocutors put it. By addressing the phenomenon of
seeing God and the discourses on it, my paper addresses several of the questions raised in your
call for papers. I discuss how this unification with the divine is a form of embodiment and what kind
of argumentation and contestations this gives rise to in the zongos. The boundary between the
divine and us humans is not the same for all who partake in these practices and the discourse on
them, challenging or (re)affirming the impermeability of this divide.

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Session 2B: Eros

Birgit Krawietz (Berlin Free University), Muscular Islam with Shamanistic features: The
many layers of Turkish oil wrestling
Turkish oil wrestling has been elevated in 2010 to the status of Intangible Cultural Heritage of
Humanity by the UNESCO. The Ottomanism and - on the surface - utter Sunnism as the religious
trademark of this ethnic event and sport of the ancestors (ata sporu) in the secular Republic of
Turkey is meanwhile heavily mixed with national rituals that invoke the brave defence of
Turkish soil. Moreover and in accordance with the Turkish History Thesis, a trans-Asian
somatic axis of male wrestling that bears a certain family resemblance is narrated. The most
conspicuous element of this historical background is the eagle dance every wrestler has to
perform before getting started. My suggested talk explores the Shamanic dimension and how it
ties in into the broader religious and cultural tapestry. I ask in how far the acting protagonists
and self- professed experts on oil wrestling are aware of their Asian heritage and admit its
lurking religious heterodoxy. The role and discursive presentation of the eagle`s flapping of his
wings before take- off shall be analyzed as a nature-based spirituality in which the wrestler
mimics in trance-inducing movements the animal the powers of which he tries to draw upon
himself. My sources are popular Turkish narratives of oil wrestling including grey literature and
field research during the main festival in Edirne that takes place on an annual basis. As for the
theoretical literature, this contribution picks up on publications on (Neo)Shamanism, ritual
studies but also biosemiotics.

Peter-Ben Smit (Utrecht University), An explosion of peace: Body, ritual and the beyond
in the Kiss of Peace
Touch, as a bodily sensation, embodying all sorts of social meanings is of importance when it
comes to experiencing the beyond. In many forms of Christian liturgy, the only moment at
which worshipers touch each other is the so-called kiss of peace (or sign of peace), at which
either a kiss is exchanged, or an embrace, or a handshake. This ritual has seen an enormous
increase in popularity and ritual prominence since the 1960s. As a basically social act, it serves
two purposes in the liturgy: a) to cross the gap between believers physically; b) to enable an
experience of communion with the sacred (the peace in which a community participates)
through a bodily and social act. This paper studies the notion of the kiss of peace in
contemporary Christian ritual, informed by historical insights as to its development. In
particular, it uses the lens of ritual failure, given that this focuses on ritual boundary crossing
(i.e., the crossing of ritual boundaries, and therefore including ritual renewal.) to analyze
contemporary discussions about the preferable form and significance of the kiss of peace. In
this way, light is shed on the role of the body in Christian ritual, in particular when it comes to
the body as the vehicle of experience communion with the sacred through a social act.

Marcel Poorthuis (Tilburg School of Catholic Theology), Cabbala, eroticism and the
primacy touch
Cabbala and eroticism seem to be a successful match. It may explain the attraction of Cabbala far
beyond the circles of orthodox Judaism. Still, the rise of Cabbala in Medieval times remains some
sort of an enigma and its possible roots in Rabbinic Judaism are still subject to intensive
research. In this paper I want to investigate the paradigm shift that becomes especially clear in
the Letter on holiness (Iggeret ha-kodesh). This medieval letter which can be read as a manual
on mysticism, but no less as a guide to eroticism. Especially noteworthy is the claim - against the
classical view as propounded by Aristotle and taken over by Jewish philosophers -, that the
sensory experience of touch ranks higher than auditory or visual experience.

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Martien Halvorson-Taylor (University of Virginia), Ecstasy and imagination in the Song
of Songs
The biblical Song of Songs crosses the perceived divide between sacred and profane in the
worlds that it imagines and in its effect on the hearer. How this seemingly secular love song
between two lovers moves toward the sacred has been a topic of much discussion. Clearly
drenched with the erotic imagery redolent of the secular world, the Song for millennia has been
understood to speak of the holy. In its long history of interpretation, the Song was read primarily
allegoricallyin Jewish tradition, as the love song between God and Israel and in Christian
tradition, as the love song between Jesus and the Church. These kinds of allegorical readings
have been understood as the means by which this divide was crossed, by which the erotic
imagery was claimed (or revalorized) for theological purpose. The bodies of the lovers and their
richly imagined world were refigured by allegory; but in the process, they fell away in order to
denote other worlds and other meanings.
More recently, however, the assessment that the Song originated within the rich ancient
near eastern tradition of love songs begs the question anew; how and by what strategies does
the Song, a secular erotic poem, traverse between the sacred and profane and back again? This
paper brings together biblical scholarship, diachronic perspective, and literary approaches to
consider this question by means of a fresh approach: The literary poetics of ecstasy which
provides a lens onto the Songs meanings and force.
Deriving from the Greek ekstasis, ecstasy signifies the state of becoming beside the self,
of moving from the ordinary to the extraordinary, and of transitioning from the normal to the
altered. Considering the Song as ecstatic poetry means not simply acknowledging its ecstatic
subject but, moreover, considering how it enacts an ecstatic experience for its hearers; in this
the Song was in good company with, for example, the roughly contemporaneous poetry of
Sappho. The literary strategies by which the Song enacts the ecstatic, include, for example,
repetition, paradox, syntactic manipulation; each of these launches the poems ecstatic rendering
of lovers imagination, both in the bodies that they imagine for themselves and each other and in
the way that they imagine their world.

Session 3A: Emotions

Julia Schwartzmann (Galilee College), He smells and judges: Can the sense of smell be
an instrument of justice?
The sense of smell is mentioned in the Bible in different contexts, but apparently its most
enigmatic appearance is in Isaiah 11:3: "He shall sense the truth by his reverence for the Lord.
He shall not judge by what his eyes behold, nor decide by what his ears perceive". This verse,
which describes the future messiah's qualities, has generated long exegetical debates in both
Judaism and Christianity. Some commentators prefer to interpret the words he shall sense
(vahariho) as metaphorically pertaining to spirit (ruah), while others insist on its literal
meaning, claiming that it refers to the actual sense of smell (re'ah). In rabbinic literature
(BTalmud, Sanhedrin 93b) Isaiah 11:3 receives a literal interpretation yielding somewhat
radical, one might say tragic, consequences. According to this reading, the messiah will be
endowed with a unique ability to make correct legal judgments based on smell alone, or as the
rabbis put it, morah vaddayin ("smells and judges"). Consequently, morah vaddayin became the
litmus test for identifying the true messiah.
Subsequent generations of commentators have struggled with the possibility of justice
being wrought by the sense of smell alone. How could the sense of smell, wondered
commentators, a sense more prone to subjectivity than any other, be entrusted to make moral

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and legal judgments? Furthermore, according to Jewish Law a proper ruling must be based on
evidence supplied by at least two eyewitnesses. Does the supposed legitimacy of the messiah's
"judging by smell" imply that the Law's validity is merely contingent?
Another question arising from the concept of morah vaddayin concerns the figure of the
messiah himself. The traditional controversy between those who, like Maimonides, identify the
messiah as a fully human political leader and those who, like the Raavad of Posquieres, see him
as a supernatural hero, is deepened by the messianic criterion of "judging by smell". Once again
the interpretational divide falls between exegetes who employ metaphorical readings to
neutralize the supernatural elements of biblical messianism and literalists who insist upon the
messiah's miraculous qualities.
Surprisingly, this old controversy was rekindled in the 20th century. Messianic claims
regarding the Rabbi of Lubavitch made it necessary to address the question of morah vaddayin
anew: should the rabbi be literally put to the test of dispensing justice through smell, or should
"judging by smell" be understood as a metaphor for exalted spirituality? The lecture will explore
different exegetical traditions and beliefs surrounding the concept of morah vaddayin along with
the very idea of substituting judicial procedure based on evidence with a material test. Is morah
vaddayin an enigmatic eschatological metaphor or a bold, yet not farfetched, scientific intuition?

Louisa Lawrence (University of Exeter), Putrid smells and the anatomy of disgust in
biblical traditions
This paper will, using specific examples, show variously how particular cult objects, political
leaders and the disabled and diseased in biblical literature are 'odorized' and rejected as
'nauseous' through olfactory tropes. In Biblical literature putrid smells are frequently used in
social discourse as a discursive vehicle for disorder and chaos and are often employed
specifically to delegitimize opponents or mark those perceived to fall short of cultic norms as
'other'. If exclusionary practices and ideologies are often founded on the perception of foul
odour then the reflex of 'disgust', a term which conjures up the visceral and primordial, is a
powerful vehicle of such discourses. Disgust frequently leaks beyond neatly bounded
physiological or sensory terrains surrounding smell and/or taste into arenas of morality and
identity.

Brenna Moore (Fordham University), A friend to ravish souls: Emotion, intimacy, and
the rhetoric of solitude in modern French Catholicism
For many of the Catholic artists and thinkers working in mid-twentieth century Paris, there was
no topic more captivating than that of supernatural experience. Some wrote about their own
bodily encounters with the beyond, like Rassa Maritain, whose Journal recounts thirty years of
locutions and visions, and eventually, a sense of actually incorporating the person of Christ into
her own body and soul. Others, like the theologian Henri de Lubac, perceived powerful spiritual
experiences from ancient sources. So they transcribed, translated, and read them aloud to
friends, over and over, hoping to recapture something of it for themselves.
No matter how they articulated their yearnings for and (if they were lucky) their own
experiences, what is remarkable is how central friendship was for so many of them in this
process. For Christians involved in the French Catholic revival in twentieth-century Paris,
interpersonal bonds and the bodily emotions that accompany intimacy (love, longing, jealousy)
were the keys to crossing into the supernatural world. Friends set in motion extraordinary
apprehensions of the sacred for each another. It is not what they say about friendship and God,
but in analyzing their correspondence, memoirs, and diaries, we see how God was made real
through the felt bonds of intimacy that tied them to one another. Moreover, emotional intensities
of friendship traversed into other realms of consciousness such as dreams of friends, memories
of loved ones, and imagined encounters with a friend, all of which were gateways to the sacred.
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The writer Julian Green wrote to Jacques Maritain God placed you in my path, so that
you might speak to me in Gods place, so that I can hear God, for the first time. Of that I am sure.
Jacques, as a friend for so many, becomes the reality of a world invisible. The Catholic scholar
of mysticism Marie-Madeline Davy described her friend Louis Massignon as a winged being
who flies up high, close to God. Near him, she described, I could breathe. The deity was
closer. After her encounters with Massignon, God remained, as she put it, etched in my flesh
through her memories.
What is remarkable about the significance of affection and intimacy here is that it grinds
against the relentless idealization of the solitary life Maritain, Davy, Massignon and so many
others in this world held. These intellectuals loved the hermit, the mystic in a cave, Nietzsches
solitary wanderer, aloof from the herd. They feel the pull of solitude and friendship with equal
depth, and this antimony pulses through much of their lives and work.
This paper is part of larger project focusing on several intellectuals, but for this short
presentation, I will focus on two examples, the Christian writers Jacques Maritain and Marie-
Madeline Davy, with a concluding example from Henri de Lubac and Michel de Certeau, whose
ruptured, broken friendship instilled in de Certeau a sense of God as loss and longing. For all of
these Christians, the emotions stoked through friendship were not distractions from the divine,
but rendered its apprehension possible.

Monique Scheer (University of Tbingen), Cross my heart: Emotions as mediating
practices in Protestant Christianities
In this paper, I would like to present my thoughts on how emotions might be conceived of as
mediating practices for Protestant Christians in Germany. First, I propose that emotions are
media in the classic sense that they are material vehicles for meaning. What makes them count
as material is their status as bodily activations, which are available to sensory perception.
Second, I will argue that emotions are something we do, they are practices (in Bourdieus sense),
so that we can speaking of emotions as mediating practices in religious life. We do emotions in
different ways, from the sudden overwhelming reaction of affect to the quieter cultivations of
feeling. That is to say, emotions vary in their proportions of materiality and immateriality, of
sensory impact, depending on how we do them. Using the example of different Protestant
groups, I will show how they enact emotions in different ways and how this is at the core of their
conflicts and negotiations with one another. While prayer and worship are emotional practices
for all Protestants, they are performed in ways that ascribe materiality or immateriality to
feelings. Whether emotions are allowed to be viewed as material or not depends on the semiotic
ideology (Webb Keane) at work, and how this determines where God manifests and where he
doesnt.

Anne-Marie Korte (Utrecht University), Greetings from beyond the grave:
Reconceptualising life after death in contemporary miracle stories
This paper is based on qualitative research into a large collection of contemporary miracle
stories (2500 narratives gathered in the Netherlands, 2003-2007). In one out of six stories the
miraculous event reported consists of receiving a (visual, audible or tangible) sign of a beloved
deceased. After introducing an example of this type of miracle story I will discuss the
prominence of this genre in this collection and address the question why in particular female
storytellers relate a miraculous experience of this kind. I will argue that this particular type of
miracle stories is related, in a gender specific way, to upcoming practices of experiencing,
managing and understanding the death and loss of loved ones in contemporary western
societies, in which both the boundary between life and death and the opposition between
religion and the secular are questioned and reconceived.

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Secondly I will show that the two most important current conceptualizations of life
versus death of western culture do not become confirmed in these stories. These miracle stories
do not suppose or elaborate on personal existence after death, heavenly and eternal life, or
immortality, which all mark the understanding of life and death in western / Abrahamic faith
practices and imaginaries. Neither do they suppose or affirm the modern conception of a fixed,
place- and time-bound separation between life and death that dominates legal, medical and
scientific discourse in modern western societies. Both these conceptualizations are absent or at
least not experienced as relevant according to these miracle stories.
The genre of the miracle story apparently offers an excellent opportunity to give form to
the continuation of relationships with the beloved dead and to work towards keeping them alive,
as have become central features in contemporary practices of grieving. The particular value of
recounting a miracle story of contact with the deceased lies in the fact that the beloved dead one
is not only remembered and made present, but is also perceived as a living person who is still
capable of affirming this special relationship on his or her own initiative and by specific material
means that refer to him or her as an individual and recognisable person. The characteristic
objects and symbols in these miracle stories that lend themselves to this affirmation will be
discussed in comparison with the prevailing imagery of personal encounter beyond death in
western religious traditions.
The theoretical framework of this paper is based on studies in the field of cultural history
(a.o. Philippe Aris), genderstudies in religion (a.o. Susan Sered), history of Christianity (a.o.
Caroline Walker Bynum), sociology of religion (a.o. Andrew Greeley, Zygmunt Bauman) and
death & dying studies (a.o. Glennys Howarth, Sandra M. Gilbert).

Session 3B: Material 1

Annalisa Butticci (Utrecht University), Mediating and re-mediating divine presence:
Raphaels Transfiguration of Christ and the African Pentecostal religious imagination
This paper looks at the intrinsic relationship between the body and its senses, material forms
and divine power in practices of mediation, re-mediation of divine presence. If religious
mediation is the act or practice of making divine presence visible and tangible through certain
media, re-mediation is the act of mediation through the representation of a media in another
media. In other words a mediation through a refashioned or repurposed media.
In this paper I will present part of my study on the encounter between African
Pentecostal and Roman Catholic visual and material culture in Italy. I will analyze intriguing
contact zones between these two expressions of Christianity and religious material worlds
where clashes and tensions occur on the use of images, material forms, substances, body and
senses, and religious authority and power. These zones are characterized by a marked
imbalance of power between Catholicism (former Italian State religion as well as the fastest-
growing and greatest expression of Christianity worldwide) and Pentecostalism (second only to
Roman Catholicism in its expansion around the globe, and yet a religious minority in Italy), as
professed by the first generation of African migrants. These contact zones are full of
fragmentations, ambiguities, and difficulties, as well as passion, creativity and emotional force.
In these contact zones the boundaries of theological constructions are crumbling, things and
images are crossing religious borders and practices of mediation and re-mediation may take
creative and subversive directions. In these contact zones the crossing of boundaries is
multidirectional and polymorphous, and involve both Pentecostal and Catholic things, human
beings and supernatural powers. In this presentation I will especially focus on a case study: the
role of Raphaels masterpiece The Transfiguration of Christ in Pentecostal and Catholic
practices of mediation and re-mediation of spiritual and social power.

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Simon OMeara (School of Oriental and African Studies), A cross at Mecca: Circling the
Kaaba
This presentation concerns the compulsory religious ritual regarding the Kaaba, the awf, or
circumambulation of the building. Although entering the Kaaba is permissible, no religious ritual
is prescribed for the interior, with prayer (alt) even being discouraged there. Rather, the
exterior of the Kaaba, its walls and adjoining semi-circular space (al-ijr), is where the religious
rituals concerning the Kaaba are performed. Foremost among these rituals is the obligatory
awf, that includes the recommended iltizm, or clinging to the wall between the entrance door
and the Black Stone. Kept just outside in this way, the pilgrim remains hovering at the threshold
of House, an in-between condition that involves the temporary fusion of body and building. This
crossed state is given clear expression in the Andalusian mystic, Ibn Arabs (d. 1240 C.E.)
account of the transformations both he and the Kaaba underwent when he performed the awf
for the first time.

Markus Balkenhol (Utrecht University), The cross-thing: Experiencing beyond
Abrahamic traditions
In this presentation I focus on the kabra mask (ancestor mask), the first mask in the history of
the Afro-Surinamese Winti religion. I argue that the mask can be seen as a cross-thing, that is
an object that acts as an intersection between at least three modes of crossing: spiritual,
temporal, and religious.
The first crossing is spiritual. As a new invention, the mask needs to persuade its
audience of its sacrality. The mask can be understood as a sensational form, a material object
that can grant access to the divine. It does so through sense experience, including all the classical
five senses. But it also persuades by narrative framing. It fits into already existing diasporic
narratives of cultural loss and oppression.
The second crossing, then, is temporal. In a way that is structurally similar to the
spiritual crossing which provides access to the divine, the mask also provides access to a
different, secular beyond: the past. The mask, a 3D model of a 19th-century Yoruba mask from
the collection of the Dutch Africa Museum, is narratively framed as a story of recovery of what
has been lost during the Middle Passage. It thus bridges the present of the descendants of the
enslaved and the past of the ancestors and their religious practice.
But there is a third crossing which might be termed religious. Like many Afro-American
religions, the Winti religion is a composite of different West African religious traditions, making
it a so-called syncretistic religion. The kabra mask also crosses the gap with the Protestantism
of the Moravian Brothers. The kabra neti (lit. kabra nights) in which the mask takes centre
stage always include a protestant service, thus establishing a crossing between different
religious traditions.
In other words, the kabra mask is an object that not only crosses the realms of the
secular and the divine, and the present and the past. By making tangible the intangible, visible
the invisible, or audible the inaudible it engages in various other modes of crossing. Rather than
becoming a hybrid, it may be more useful to talk about the mask as a cross-thing that not
only makes crossings possible but is itself made up of crossings.

Ahmad Sukkar (Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies), Crossing boundaries between the
body, space and architecture in the Islamic tradition: On Abd al-Ghan al-Nbuluss
Mift al-Fut (The Key of Openings)
Drawing on the Quran, early Muslim scholars described various kinds of boundaries and
crossing between them such as the boundaries of the worlds of the body, the soul, and the spirit

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(al-Mulk, al-Malakt, and al-Jabart); the crossing between four houses of existence (the womb,
this word, the tomb, and the hereafter) through birth, death and the resurrection; and the
crossing the Prophet made between this world and the heavens during his Night Journey and
Ascension. Later Muslim scholars such as the eminent Sufi Damascene scholar Abd al-Ghan al-
Nbulus (d. 1731) drew on this mystically. Focusing on a tract he wrote by the end of the
seventeenth-century, this paper searches premodern philosophical texts that explain how the
body crosses boundaries between sacred and profane realms via its senses. Entitled Mift al-
Fut f Mishkt al-Jism wa-Zujjat al-Nafs wa-Mib al-R (The Key of Openings Concerning
the Niche of the Body, the Glass of the Soul, and the Light of the Spirit), al-Nbuluss text is an
extended commentary on a concise treatise on the human reality by an earlier eminent Ottoman
scholar and leading Islamic cleric, shaykh al-Islm Keml Pshzde (d. 1534). The importance
of al-Nbuluss hitherto unstudied and unpublished commentary lies in shedding light on a
philosophical-mystical debate over the nature of human reality and the role of the senses in
understanding it. The debate spans more than five centuries, involving leading Muslim
philosophers and mystics, such as Shihb al-Dn al-Suhraward (d. 1191), Fakhr al-Dn al-Rz (d.
1210), Ibn Arab (d. 1240), and Jall al-Dn al-Dawn (d. 1502). Citing Pshzde, al-Nbulus
draws analogies between the world of the body and the senses, the world of the soul and the
intellect, and the world of the spirit and imagination. Describing how the human being crosses
boundaries between the four houses of existence through several kinds of birth, death, and the
resurrections (natural and mystical), he discusses the rules relating to dwelling in, and moving
between these houses in terms relevant to the senses. He critically examines different
arguments concerning whether the Prophets Night Journey and Ascension was real with
regards to the body or merely a dream. The penetration of the confine of heaven and earth
through the abstraction from the body and the dismissal of the senses is central to his mystical
arguments. To this end he discusses the ascension of the prophet s (Jesus Christ). Analysing
relevant concepts in key texts cited in al-Nbuluss Mift, this paper shows the significance of
the Mift in presenting a holistic view of similar universal crossings based on his interpretation
of the Islamic monotheism, Ibn Arabs doctrine of the Unity of Being and al-Suhrawards
Illuminationism. It argues that although al-Nbulus is critical of what he sees as a rationalistic
approach of Pshzde and other scholars he cites in this text, most notably Ibn Sn, his
mystical experience of the body and the crossing via its internal and external senses is based on
the rationalism of the late premodern and early modern period of the Islamic tradition.

Day 3 (Saturday 21 st March)
Session 4A: Material 2

Sonja Luehrmann (Simon Fraser University), Moulded imaginaries: Iconographic media
as an environment of canonical perception
Cognitive approaches to human religiosity often draw parallels between religious ideas and
forms of mental imagery that are considered to be important for human ontogenetic or
phylogenetic development, such as imaginary friends, anthropomorphism as a survival strategy
etc. Such approaches understand religious activity as an unbridled exercise of the human
imagination that rationalist modern adults suppress. They also tend to treat religion as a purely
mental phenomenon, independent of material media and social practice. Using the example of
Eastern Orthodox Christian iconography, I argue that many religious traditions aim to restrict
and mould the human imagination rather than giving it free rein, and that they do so by means of
material media. In post-Byzantine strands of Eastern Christianity, the use of material pictures to
contemplate during prayer has long been paradoxically combined with suspicion against the
imaginative evocation of mental imagery during prayer. In this paper, I trace a contemporary

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phase of this debate by looking at 19th-century Russian Orthodox polemics against Catholic
spiritual exercises and their echoes in interviews with post-Soviet Russian iconographers and
lay believers which I conducted between 2005 and 2014. Drawing on Lambert Wiesings
distinction between perceived and mental images, I interpret iconography as an attempt to bind
mental images to constraints of a similar strength as those that govern perception of the natural
world, by means of a historically constituted media environment that is constructed around
questions of the good and advisable rather than the possible. It is these ongoing debates about
the good that add a historical dimension to religious media environments, making them into a
site where evolving moral experience turns into canonical standards for individual habits of
perception.

Glenn Peers (University of Texas at Austin), the matter of crossing beyond (and back) in
the Byzantine World
Matter, including that which comprises humans and all else, is in a constant state of movement.
In that state, crossing over is more accurately moving among sacred and profane. Processes of
making and understandings of materials reveal deep workings of a cultures places in this world
and in its other worlds. Art and its making have intelligence, then, and art historians need to be
sensitive to material and its ways of creating passages, like those Michael Baxandall described in
The Limewood Sculptors of Renaissance Germany. Byzantine understandings of crossing points
between the worldly and celestial, in face of theologians explanations, was always and fully
through matter.
For example, geological explanations in the Byzantine context show the labile nature of
stone and ores. For Byzantine, ores were not discrete, but strove for perfection, according to
their (watery) nature, so traces of silver in gold deposits were not an accident of geological
formation, but a sign that silver in time purified to gold. Not all matter had that ability, but some
did naturally, and some needed help in its striving (enter alchemy, craft, artBaxandalls
chiromancy, perhaps). And so things made from gold or with gold as an element (gold leaf as
ground for icons, for example) participated in alteration toward a more perfect state, but they
also revealed in their effects aesthetic passage to other sacred states that could only be known
by participating bodies. Untarnishable glow that absorbed and transformed was a primary
means by which those bodies knew a crossing-over state.
Other materials also made risky crossings. Ivory was long associated with edge-states,
marking boundaries to the netherworld in Homer and Virgil (argued recently by Paroma
Chatterjee), and its translucent state (lighted by candle or lamp) likewise revealed in its own
material conditionsas made object of wonderpassage to other states. While texts are nearly
silent about bronze and iron casting in the Byzantine world, that craft clearly survived. The
elemental range of these metals demonstrated the transmutation of matter for Byzantines, the
ways matter could pass to other states or conditions that appeared different, but were really,
essentially the same. That self-evident, essential unity of the world gave Byzantines possibilities
to discover their own passages from mundane to sacred.
This paper argues that human autonomy in traversing divides can be over-estimated.
Matter needs attending, because it is only in this material state that any body can find crossing
points to the beyond. And the beyond can be in the material coursing around ones body, if one
knows (as only someone in that culture can know fully) how matter constantly makes crossing,
and back again, alive to one. Finally, such approaches to matter can contain its own undoing in a
culture with iconoclasm in it, and how bodies were challenged to defend and to define their
material traversing is likewise related to Baxandalls description of arts constant potential for
self-destruction.

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Frank J. Korom (Boston University), Multi sensorial crossings in a contemporary Sufi

community
In his essay Why We Need Things, Mihaly Czikszentmihaly writes, Every artifact is the
product of human intentionality, but that intentionality itself is conditioned by the existence of
previous objects (1993: 21). In this sense, material culture embodies potentialities that are not
necessarily in the control of human agency and creativity. They rather work reciprocally, for
man-made objects can assume their own sense of volition once created. If we minimally define
agency as the capacity to effect changes in the external world (Sax 2009: 93-94), then all things
can have agency, not just individuals, but entire groups of people as well as non-human agents
such as ghosts, machines, photographs, beds, clothes, and a vast variety of other such things.
Czikszentmihaly further states that artifacts have symbiotic and/or parasitic relationships with
human beings, thus creating both biophysical and psychological dependencies that enable the
self to become stable in time and space (Ibid). Moreover, one of the three functions of objects he
identifies is to emplace the individual self within a broader social network of beings sharing
relationships based on common values and concerns. A picture of a person, place, or thing, for
example, can thus serve as an icon of the past, and when viewed repeatedly anchors the
individual temporally and spatially, providing permanence, so as to avoid getting lost in the
labyrinths of memory (Ibid: 26).
The integral relationship of objects to selves is universally applicable, but my basic
contention is that through ongoing interaction with a range of representational objects, a
community of like-minded individuals can maintain intimate contact with their spiritual guide
decades after his death. Stated another way, that which is physically absent can be rendered
present through sensory interaction with things formerly belonging to or associated with the
departed entity. Engaging in such dialectical practices with things allows members of the
religious community in question to continue to make progress on their respective spiritual
paths. I refer to this phenomenon as the presence of absence.
To develop this concept, I wish to draw upon one contemporary Sufi group called the
Bawa Muhaiyaddeen Fellowship, which has branches in the United States, Canada, and Sri Lanka,
where the parent organization is located under the Sri Lankan incorporated name Serendib Sufi
Study Circle. Although the birthplace of the founder is uncertain, the island nation is the place
where Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen, a Tamil speaking saint, began his public
career. His birth date is not known but he died in 1986 and is buried outside of Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania. I focus here on members use of photographs of Bawa, sound recordings of his
sermons, as well as items such as slippers, sandals, and shoes he wore; chairs in which he sat,
beds on which he slept, artwork he painted, and vegetarian recipes he prescribed to remember
him constantly in the present by utilizing the senses as vehicles for accomplishing an ongoing
state of communication with the founder. In so doing, it allows the community not only to see
him but also to touch, smell, hear, and taste him. In short, they feel his presence through
repeated full body experiences. The argument assumes a form of corpothetics at play, in which
the entire sensorial range of the body is engaged synaesthetically in the process of practicing
lived religion (Pinney 2004: 19). The emphasis on full bodily involvement allows us to move
beyond the privileged concept of auspicious sight (daran) in South Asian religions to penetrate
even deeper into how the entire range of the bodys capacities are employed and engaged in the
mystical process of making present that which is currently absent. In so doing, I am concerned
with aesthetic nature of material objects, but also share with Christopher Pinney the desire to
explore the question what stuff does.

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Anne E. Lester (University of Colorado at Boulder), Beholding the body of Christ: Relics,
translation and the revelation of religious truth in the aftermath of the Fourth Crusade
It has long been recognized that the great influx of relics coming from Greece and the Levant
during the time of the crusades had a profound effect on the development of the aesthetics and
practices of Christian spirituality in the west. This paper examines more specifically the role of
relics translated from Greece and Constantinople following the Fourth Crusade (ca. 1204-1261).
Greek relics, and especially fragments of the True Cross often sent to the west in Byzantine
reliquaries known as staurotheke, as well as numerous other fragments relating to the Passion,
introduced a different set of aesthetic ideas and visual images into the repertoire of western
Christian devotional images. Paired with new ideas about the regulation of relics veneration,
which stressed the importance of seeing and visualization, and the ambitions of Innocent IIIs
pastoral reform movement, relics and the reliquaries created for them after 1204 offered new
ways of communicating religious truths and representing the unseen power of the saints, of the
cross, and the Passion. The veneration of relics in this way also forced a new level of abstraction
as objects came to stand in for and index a series of more complex images and ideas. A fragment
of the cross concealed behind doors that opened references not only the finding of the true cross,
but also the potential for resurrection, and the redemptive power of Christs sacrifice; all ideas
that Christians were increasingly encouraged to discover and understand through new acts of
looking, seeing, imagining, visualizing and internalizing through the intellect. By the 1260s,
something as simple and singular as one thorn could communicate the suffering of Christ on the
cross and the message of salvation that contained. This kind of abstraction can be traced through
the enshrining of the Eucharistic wafer in the emergence of the Feast of Corpus Christi. This
paper will draw on the extremely influential work of Hans Belting, among others, but also seeks
to understand the role of relics as material objects within the newer framework of material
studies and materiality to suggest how these objects work not only as art, but as things that
moved and shaped religious ideas and devotional practices. The medium of relics of objects
and materials was far more effective for communicating complex ideas and faith experiences.
Because bones (bodies), wood, stone, and cloth, were all objects that could move and be moved,
stolen and sent as gifts, removed and reframed in new containers, altars, reliquaries, and
contexts both physical and aesthetic, they offer a particularly potent point of entry into thinking
about the aesthetics of crossing and touch on many aspects of representation, imagination, the
intellect and the locatedness of the Passion and of Gods chosen people. As Gautier Cornu,
archbishop of Sens made clear, once the Passion relics of Constantinople came to France, that
kingdom became the new Jerusalem, favored by Christ. By means of the material, God and
Christ had crossed from the Holy Land to France.

Janneke Raaimakers and Jelle Visser (Utrecht University), Seeing the unseen God:
Worship of visible things in the Carolingian period/early Middle Ages?
This paper is about holy bodies as mediators of the divine: saints bodies, but also the body of
Christ. What was the role of sight in the veneration of relics in the early Middle Ages and in
understanding the meaning of these seemingly insignificant fragments of bones, ashes and
blood? For this paper we have studied some case studies to trace ideas about the presence of
God made visible through relics and the role of sight in gaining access to divine power and the
salving intercession of the saints. Not all early medieval scholars reflected on this topic in
relation to relics. Alcuin, for example, a great scholar at the court of Charlemagne, who wrote
several texts on saints, did not, but he did reflect on the possibilities (and limits) of sight and to
Gods (in)visibility in relation to the sacraments. What can we learn from this?

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Session 4B: Hearing

Daniel Becerra (Duke University), Origen and the spoken word
For Origen of Alexandria, traversing the gulf between humanity and the divine entailed
transforming the self into the likeness of God. The human soul was the locus of the divine
revelation and the cultivation of virtue was the means by which the boundary separating
creature and creator could be permeated. Scholars have long recognized the role of scripture in
the formation and ascent of the Christians soul in Origens thought. Typically, scripture is
presented as facilitating the souls participation in God in three ways: 1) it teaches a message,
which if applied to practical life aids in psychic growth; 2) it tailors the content of the message to
the particular needs and abilities of the pupil; and 3) it provides a graded template for the souls
ascent (e.g. the graded pedagogy of Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and the Song of Solomon).This paper
contributes to this discussion by exploring the role of the corporeal faculties of hearing and
speech in Origens scripture-soul dialectic. It asks: in what ways do the oral articulation and
aural apprehension of scripture facilitate an experience with the divine? Using Origens Contra
Celsum, Homilies on Joshua, and Exhortation to Martyrdom as case studies, this paper will
demonstrate the ways in which Origen understood scriptureas spoken and heardto cleanse
the soul and body of demonic influences, instill virtue, and transform character, thereby
enabling the soul, in the oral and aural sensory experience, to transcend humanity and
participate in divinity.

Tala Jarjour (University of Notre Dame), Sound, place, and affective manifestations of
the aesthetic in Syriac chant
The body of liturgical chants and hymns in the Syrian Orthodox Church of Antioch, commonly
known as Syriac Chant, is an oral tradition that dates back to the early Christian decades. Syriac
itself, a dialect of Aramaic which became the language of early learned Christianity and its
theological literature in Late Antiquity, was created in the environs of the ancient city of Edessa,
where modern-day Urfa stands in southeastern Turkey. Members of the Syriac-speaking church
(the Suryani people) lived continuously in the ancient locale until they were forced to leave in
the aftermath of the First World War, following perceived threats to their individual lives and
collective existence. The group crossed the border to safety in Syria, and eventually settled in
Aleppo after the church bought the land where their refugee camp initially stood. Their main
church, St Georges of the old Suryani neighbourhood, which was the first concrete building the
community erected among the tin-roofed homes, combined architectural features from the two
churches left behind in Urfa. Whereas chanted prayers have never been heard in the two original
buildings after the Christian exodus, the sounds of chants the Urfallis have been handing down
for generations since their home city was called Edessa continue to resonate in the new locale,
despite ongoing fighting in the city since 2011.
This paper deals with a combination of issues and questions relating to the story of
Edessan chant and its sounds. Its proposition rests on combined historical, ethnographic and
musical-theoretical analyses, which show an intricate relationship between questions of place,
faith, sound, and emotion. It argues for a locally constructed set of musical aesthetics, which
manifest in affective expressions of religiosity and spirituality while being at the same time
grounded in conceptions of place and value. Problematised as it is in a conservative Muslim-
majority urban context, the body is for Urfallis the vehicle through which this expression is
carried out. But because of the complex combination of locatedness and dislocatedness between
Urfa and Aleppo, the significance of the body is relegated to the voice, which, according to Syriac
theology, can in turn traverse time as well as space in the ritual act.

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Scott Kugle (Emory University), A crooked cap marks the right way to pray: Embodying
love in Qawwali
One of the most powerful expressions of Islamic mysticism is Qawwali, a devotional music of
South Asia. Cultivated by Sufis in the Chishti Order starting in the 12th century, this ritual
singing has origins in the circle of the Chishti saint, Nizam al-Din Awliya of Delhi. His disciples
Amir Khusro and Amir Hasan composed many poems in Persian and Hindi that form the core
repertoire of Qawwali. This presentation will explore Qawwali to explain how the body of the
beloved serves as a lens for comprehending the divine presence. The divine presence is
immanent but fleeting in this world, but will be overwhelming and rapturous in the next.
Glimpses of beauty and surge of love in this world serve as emotional signs toward salvation in
the next world, just as verses of the Quran serve as linguistic and ritual signs. Poetry captures
the emotional experiences of loving devotion with the beloved standing in for the Kaba and the
Qur'an, and these experiences are recreated for Sufi audiences when the poetry is performed as
song in a ritual setting. The analyze this dynamic, we will focus on the image of the Sufi master
or beloved wearing his cap awry, as depicted in Persian and Urdu poetry that is sung in Qawwali.

Isaac Weiner (The Ohio State University), Soundmapping religious boundaries:
Reflections on an emerging methodology
In her recent response to the Global Prayers project, Birgit Meyer notes that an investigation of
religious urban soundscapes can offer a formidable entry point into the study of religious
conflicts that helps to bring out a hitherto often unheard dimension. Indeed, several scholars
have begun to explore how sacred sounds and sonic practices function not only to unite
members of a religious community but also to mediate contact across religious boundaries,
giving rise to new forms of coexistence and conflict. For example, in my own recently published
book, Religion Out Loud, I analyzed the politics of religious pluralism in the U.S. by attending to
disputes about public religious sound, such as church bells, amplified proselytizing, and the
Islamic call to prayer. By interrogating the different religious and legal-juridical logics that
governed the construction of auditory space throughout U.S. history, I used sound as a
productive site for exploring broader contests over religious presence, public power, and social
order.
In a new project, I develop these themes through the construction of a religious
soundmap. Working with a team of faculty colleagues and student researchers, we are making
high quality field recordings of religion in practice, which we will integrate, along with visual
images, interviews, and interpretive essays, onto an online digital mapping platform. This new
methodology offers exciting possibilities for representing how religions take place in
particular urban contexts, how religious and secular sounds promiscuously mix, and how cities
generate particular temporal and spatial rhythms of their own. Rather than restrict ourselves to
a particular religious soundscape, our intent is to think expansively about all the different kinds
of sounds and spaces through which one encounters religion in the city and the way that these
sonic practices mediate and facilitate different kinds of boundary-crossings. In so doing, this
project responds to Meyers call for new research designs and methodologies...that allow us to
explore the coexisting dynamics of different practices of (religious) space-making that rub
against, as well as interfere with each other in habitats characterized by diversity and
pluralism.
In this paper, I propose to offer some brief reflections on the possibilities and limits of
religious soundmapping in light of my previous work on sonic contestation. I plan to structure
my comments around three interrelated questions: 1) How can soundmapping attend to the
ways that religious groups inscribe themselves, sonically, on the urban landscape while also
attending to the ways these practices are heard and responded to by others? 2) How might
soundmapping destabilize the religious/secular divide by directing our attention to how sounds
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come to be classified as religious or secular? 3) How can soundmapping serve to make audible
practices that often go unnoticed while also attending to dynamics of unbalanced power? That is,
how do we take seriously the politico-aesthetics of religious expression by noting how certain
practices come to be more or less audible than others in particular settings?

Anderson Blanton (Max Planck Institute), The point of contact: Radio prayers and the
apparatus of belief
Throughout the middle of the twentieth century, millions of Americans simultaneously tuned-in
to hear Oral Roberts' instructions to "put your hand upon the radio cabinet as a point of contact"
to facilitate the communication of miraculous healing power during the "prayer time" of his
famous Healing Waters Broadcast. Providing concrete archival and ethnographic detail to
approach the contemporary debates on the relation between "the miracle and the special effect"
(de Vries) in the fields of philosophy and critical theory, this talk demonstrates the way tele-
technologies such as the radio have organized new forms of ritual efficacy in the late modern
world. Attending to the intimate relations between the miraculous and the technological, my
talk describes how the transductions of the radio allowed the religious subject to experience the
sound of prayer in a new tactile register. Articulating the profound performative and
experiential shifts in the ancient prayer-gesture of manus imposito (laying on of hands)
organized through the radio apparatus, my presentation utilizes archival images and sound
recordings to track the development of mass mediated techniques of faith healing. This
presentation has emerged out of my current Materiality of Prayer project sponsored by the
Social Science Research Councils New Directions in the Study of Prayer research initiative.

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