Abstract
The matters of religion and religious experience are made up of multiple components. In the study of religion, and even in some theological approaches, it is increasingly becoming clear that religious experience is never merely a matter of ideas and doctrines, nor is it merely a matter of disembodied individual experiences or mindless practices. Crude idealism, which focuses on abstract ideas, is insufficient for the study of religion, if not misguided. The same can be said of crude materialism, which focuses on matter in a deterministic way, although religion and theology have less frequently been studied from this perspective.
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Notes
Chemical dependencies, for instance, are common and medical drugs often merely cover up the deeper causes and problems of depression, providing a quick fix that does not resolve anything. Positive thinking can create a make-believe world that does not change reality and that misleads people into believing that they have power when they really do not. For a broader critique of positive thinking see Barbara Ehrenreich, Brightsided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009).
Sean McCloud, Divine Hierarchies: Class in American Religion and Religious Studies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
William E. Connolly “Materialities of Experience,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 196.
Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire: From Paul to Postcolonial Times (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2007).
Clayton Crockett and Jeffrey Robbins, Religion, Politics, and the Earth: The New Materialism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012).
Sandra Harding, “Beyond Postcolonial Theory: Two Undertheorized Perspectives on Science and Technology,” in The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader, ed. Sandra Harding (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 21.
Rosi Braidotti, “The Politics of ‘Life Itself’ and New Ways of Dying,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 212.
Coole and Frost, “Introducing the New Materialisms,” 31. I talk about this in terms of the “logic of downturn.” See Joerg Rieger, No Rising Tide: Theology, Economics, and the Future (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2009).
Jason Edwards, “The Materialism of New Materialism,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 283.
Sara Ahmed, “Orientations Matter,” in New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, Politics, ed. Diana Coole and Samantha Frost (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 243.
See, for instance, Ada María Isasi-Díaz, Mujerista Theology: A Theology for the Twenty-First Century (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1996).
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© 2016 Joerg Rieger
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Rieger, J. (2016). Rethinking the New Materialism for Religion and Theology. In: Rieger, J., Waggoner, E. (eds) Religious Experience and New Materialism. Radical Theologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-56844-1_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-56844-1_6
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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Online ISBN: 978-1-137-56844-1
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