The Religious Lives of Everyday People

Catalog description

For centuries, scholars have looked to religious institutions, theological doctrines, and sacred texts to explain religion’s form and function in culture and society. And while this approach has enabled scholars to neatly prescribe what counts as religious, it’s also caused them to ignore the ways people’s daily faith practices make a mess of this work. Drawing on sub-fields in religious studies, anthropology, and sociology, this course explores how formal ideas of religion expand when confronted with the normality of everyday life. From cooking and talking to prayer and devotion, the “religious” and “non-religious” things people do tell us a lot about how religion animates and is animated by lived experience, and how porous the boundary is between the “sacred” and “profane”.