Monday, July 18, 2011

Religion, lived and visible!

Turns out "lived religion" isn't just a movement among historians and sociologists of American religion excited by the promise of religious ethnography. "Lived religion" appears also to be the name of another movement - unrelated to the American though kin in its enthusiasm for the ethnographic - in Europe, at the boundaries of religious education, "World Christianity" and pastoral praxis. I don't know much about it, but I just received a fat collection called Lived Religion: Conceptual, Empirical and Practical-Theological Approaches: Essays in Honor of Hans-Günter Heimbrock on interlibrary loan (Heimbrock seems to have made a distinction between gelebte [lived] and gelehrte [taught] Religion); it has over three dozen contributors! I also got myself a copy of Elizabeth Koepping's Food, Friends and Funerals: On Lived Religion. Both books appeared in 2008, and both were published by the same German publisher (LIT, in Münster)! I don't alas have time to read them right now, but I note a sweet new definition of religion in Koepping: "being a person in the visible and less visible world" (2). Nice!