
David MorganDuke University | DU · Department of Religious Studies
David Morgan
PhD
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133
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Introduction
David Morgan teaches in the Department of Religious Studies at Duke University. He researches the material history of Christianity since the 16th century. Morgan recently published 'Images at Work: The Material Culture of Enchantment'. He is currently completing a new book entitled 'The Thing about Religion: An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions.'
Skills and Expertise
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August 2008 - present
Publications
Publications (133)
In Newtonian physics, time is absolute, a universally uniform reality. Physics and philosophy since Newton have recognized Einstein’s claim to the contrary. Time is not simply out there, according to Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It depends on the human presence of its observer. “Time is … not a real process, not an actual succession that I am content to...
This Author Meets Respondents Session aims to introduce and discuss the forthcoming book "Beyond Karbala: New Approaches to Shiʿi Materiality and Material Religion" (Brill, 2024) [now renamed Religion That Matters: Shiʿi Materiality Beyond Karbala]. The book brings together 12 empirical contributions which examine manifestations and transformations...
In this lavishly illustrated book, David Morgan surveys the visual culture that shaped American Protestantism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries--a vast record of images in illustrated bibles, Christian almanacs, children's literature, popular religious books, charts, broadsides, Sunday school cards, illuminated devotional items, tracts, chr...
It is often thought that since remote, rare, and ephemeral events such as apparitions are not available to the direct observation of scholars, the question of their nature as events must be set aside in scholarly inquiry. This results in a focus on meaning that can ignore the qualities of the event as reported and as apprehended by devotional image...
The study of Protestant visual culture requires a number of correctives since many scholars and Protestants themselves presume images have played no role in religious practice. This essay begins by identifying misleading assumptions, proposes the importance of a visual culture paradigm for the study of Protestantism, and then traces the history of...
Roberta Gilchrist. 2020. Sacred heritage: monastic archaeology, identities, beliefs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 978-1-108-49654-7 hardback £75. - David Morgan
Devotional piety broadly depends on events that are not accessible for direct observation and commonly offer very little, if anything, in the way of historical documentation. Sometimes the experiences to which devotion is directed in the veneration of saints is based on visionary experience for which reports are contradictory. This essay explores w...
Devotional piety broadly depends on events that are not accessible for direct observation and commonly offer very little, if anything, in the way of historical documentation. Sometimes the experiences to which devotion is directed in the veneration of saints is based on visionary experience for which reports are contradictory. This essay explores w...
Introductory remarks on defining enchantment in regard to the study of material culture.
Beginning with a definition of the sacred as a two-fold process of making things special, which consists of accentuation and affiliation, this essay proceeds to argue that things are made sacred in devotional piety and in fine art in parallel ways that configure images within webs of agents. The two kinds of imagery perform in practices of sacraliz...
This response to Meyer's work focuses attention on the materiality of studying religion and how the sociality of religious practice may be studied in material terms. The value of this approach and the manner in which it is conducted vary from more traditional approaches to religion by offering a different conception of what religion is and does.
A reflection on the relationship of fine art and devotional imagery in the modern era, focusing on their discrete configuration of the sacred.
Religions teach their adherents how to see and feel at the same time; learning to see is not a disembodied process but one hammered from the forge of human need, social relations, and material practice. David Morgan argues that the history of religions may therefore be studied through the lens of their salient visual themes. The Forge of Vision tel...
remarks welcoming participants to the first international conference sponsored by the journal Material Religion, held at Duke University, September 10-12, 2015.
Opening with a review of leading accounts of the image as an object with agency, this article proposes to study religious images within the webs or networks that endow them with agency. The example of a well-known medieval reliquary serves to show how what I refer to as 'focal objects'
participate in the creation of assemblages that engage human an...
Beginning its sixth year of publication, Material Religion is an interdisciplinary journal that seeks to gather the best work from around the world engaged in materializing the study of religions. The editors welcome original scholarship on any religion and from any period in human history that treats material objects and practices as primary evide...
This article considers recent changes in the definition of religion and of media as the basis for framing the study of their relation to one another and recent research in the intersection they have come to form over the last two decades or so. The history, materiality, and reception of each have colored scholarly work, and made ethnography, practi...
This chapter addresses modern Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, originating in the appearances of Jesus experienced by nun Margaret-Mary Alacoque (1647–90). Since the seventeenth century, understandings of the Heart of Jesus have shifted from visceral to symbolic registers: from a fetish (a concealing object standing in for something...
Cambridge Core - History of Ideas and Intellectual History - The Cambridge Companion to Religious Studies - edited by Robert A. Orsi
This chapter explores how seeing and feeling participates in the larger enterprise of affectively organizing social life. Philosopher Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments states that moral behavior is produced from feelings of approbation and censure that children encountered in the gaze of others, rather than innate principles. Children then le...
This introductory chapter discusses the importance of vision in relation to the act of embodiment. Seeing is a primary medium of social life. Given that communal relations are established and sustained in different kinds of looks such as shy glances, bold stares, rapt gazes, or averted eyes, seeing allows one to interpret an encounter, confirm a re...
This chapter explores the relation between touching and seeing, as well as matter and spirit, in terms of several different moments in the controversial history of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In English, the verb behold suggests this relationship between sight and touch. To see can mean “to want to touch”; hence, religious seeing ind...
This chapter describes the procedure of seeing. Seeing is a process that tends to happen in repeated methods, which organize elements of visualization into characteristic fields or gazes. On that note, seeing has two ways: a reciprocal gaze, in which the image returns the gaze of the viewer (or vice versa); and a unilateral gaze, in which the direc...
This chapter argues that external and internal images are interrelated since external images are the medium for grasping and maintaining the internal, which are ephemeral, unstable, and evolving compared to anything material. This notion supports the belief that fleeting, private, inscrutable, or contrived images are all made available and credible...
This chapter describes how sound created silence, which offers the temporal space where sacred objects—the shofar, the bread and wine, the liturgical regalia of the Mass—are staged. This scenario is particularly evident in the mass, wherein the ringing bell signals the arrival of the sacred object, and is registered in the bodies of the worshipers,...
This chapter discusses iconicity as a prevalent and powerful way in which images mediate relations and exchange in religion as well as in modern society practices. For instance, Orthodox icons—the images of particularly sacred persons—which were the primary form of iconography brought back to Western Europe by Crusaders, mediate two parties in an i...
This book builds on the author’s previous groundbreaking work to offer this new, systematically integrated theory of the study of religion as visual culture. Providing key tools for scholars across disciplines studying the materiality of religions, the author gives an accessibly written theoretical overview including case studies of the ways seeing...
Christianity has generally been understood as a system of beliefs. From the perspective of doctrines and dogmas, wrought by intense argument that has defined the contentious line distinguishing orthodoxy and heterodoxy, that is certainly what it is. But that very history, so much a history of the body, opens onto a broader world of belief. As a liv...
Several different accounts of ‘mediatisation’ and ‘mediation’ circulate in the literature of media studies. This paper begins with a parsing of them, considering their conceptual distinctions and similarities. The argument developed here is for a general theory of mediation and a more particular view of mediatisation. Although developing a critical...
A thing is distinguished by several primary characteristics: it consists of parts, it borders on other things, it is finite, and it may be intentional. Each of these predicates something different of a thing. But a thing remains ill-defined until we discern what it does, that is, until we grasp its relationship to the milieu in which it exists. At...
Over the past six years, the editors and a variety of contributors to this journal have reflected on definitions of material culture, on the materiality of religions, and on the sensory characteristics of religious practices. Doing so is important if we want to achieve theoretical insights
that inform scholarship and advance the field of the materi...
Sound and Space in Renaissance Venice: Architecture, Music, Acoustics. By HowardDeborah and MorettiLaura. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2010. xv + 368 pp. $55.00 cloth. - Volume 79 Issue 4 - David Morgan
Beginning its sixth year of publication, Material Religion is an interdisciplinary journal that seeks to gather the best work from around the world engaged in materializing the study of religions. The editors welcome original scholarship on any religion and from any period in human history that treats material objects and practices as primary evide...
Imaginary Friends: Representing Quakers in American Culture, 1650–1950. By RyanJames Emmett. Studies in American Thought and Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009. xii+285 pp. $26.95 paper; $19.95 e-book. - Volume 79 Issue 2 - David Morgan
A reflection on the course of my work on mass-produced Protestant images and their circulation and popular reception. The essay argues that visuality consists not merely of the way things look, but in the practices of belief that construct likeness.
This chapter explores the use of images, art as well as popular imagery, in constructing America's national identity. It argues that national identity, civil piety, and religion are intertwined in these identity constructions. An image in an early schoolbook, for example, shows George Washington at prayer on the eve of battle, thereby pointing to t...
Religions are powerful communities of feeling, compelling ways of experiencing connections with others. As such, they structure human relations in patterns that rely on media and the arts to accomplish significant cultural work such as nurture children, disseminate information, and order forms of association by arousing and managing common sentimen...
'From The Passion of the Christ to the presumed 'clash of civilizations', religion's role in culture is increasingly contested and mediated. Key Words in Religion, Media, and Culture is a welcome and interdisciplinary contribution that maps the territory for those who aim to make sense of it all. Highlighting the important concepts guiding state-of...
Although it is commonly asserted that Protestantism bears an intrinsic antagonism toward images, this claim is manifestly, contradicted by a long history of the production and use of images among Protestants the world over. At the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth, British organizations such as Hannah More’s Cheap Re...
Authentic Fakes: Religion and American Popular Culture. By ChidesterDavid. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005. xii + 294 pp. $50.00 cloth; $19.95 paper. - Volume 74 Issue 4 - David Morgan