13 - Practicing religions

Summary

INTRODUCTION

“It is not easy to speak of practice other than negatively,” Pierre Bourdieu writes. Like many such key words, practice might be better thought of as a term that invokes several loosely bound, historically developed debates. One does not need to delve too far into religious studies before noting the ubiquity of discussions surrounding practice and the word's wide semantic field. Practice can, for example, signal interest in the things religious people do (praying, singing, meditating, and reading, to name just some of the things religious people do) within the genealogies and traditions associated with these activities. Practice also signals a theoretical and conceptual turn to religion that emphasizes embodiment, habit, and daily activity as much as earlier generations emphasized belief, texts, and orthodox theologies proper. Discussions of practice also engage debates about the normative and ethical impact of certain modes of action, linking studies of religion to questions of virtue, its proper cultivation, and of the relation of religious virtues to civic, democratic, or political practice.

Invoking practice, in other words, signals “particular formations of meaning – ways not only of discussing but at another level of seeing many of our central experiences,” as cultural critic and historian Raymond Williams put it. With this in mind, we can venture that the commonalities among divergent uses of practice center on the “everyday” living expressions of religions and on investigations of religion's power and authority unfolding in habitual and embodied actions.