The Materiality of Interreligious Encounters

This special issue, “The Materiality of Interreligious Encounters,” provides a diverse sample of scholarly attention to the role of the material in interreligious relations. It features articles by five anthropologists (Hanane Benadi, Yulia Egorova, Samuel Everett, Lindsay Simmonds, and Erica Weiss) whose research considers spaces of religious intersection, proximity, and negotiation and the potential of material things therein. Prompted by Birgit Meyer’s opening reflection, with responses from Ayala Fader, Vlad Naumescu, and Jeremy Walton, this issue’s In Conversation section further explores how closer focus on senses, aesthetics, space, time, and music can enhance our understanding of interreligious encounters as well as offer fresh insights at the nexus of religion and materiality. Together, these wide-ranging articles offer three main contributions: they demonstrate the material pragmatics of living together; they illuminate interreligious proximities that tend to be lost in discursive processes of religious differentiation; and they subvert normative views of interreligious encounter as primarily a matter of clashing beliefs, texts, and theologies.