The Feel of Religious Objects: Brent Plate [Rebroadcast]

When you were growing up, did you hum that old song by The Police - "we are spirits in the material world..."? Fast forward thirty years, and a lot of religious scholars have made a return to the physical, exploring how objects and actions inform and enrich our understandings of interior religious lives.

That question has become the focus of the work by S. Brent Plate.

Professor Plate's teachings and writings explore relations between sensual life and spiritual life. He has authored/edited eleven books and writes regularly for the Huffington Post, Religion Dispatches, Killing the Buddha, OnFaith, and other sites. He is co-founder and managing editor of Material Religion: The Journal of Objects, Art, and Belief, co-founder and president of SCRIPT (Society for Comparative Research in Iconic and Performative Texts), president of CrossCurrents/ The Association of Religion and Intellectual Life, and is a board member of the Interfaith Coalition of Greater Utica, NY. He discusses this issue in his book, A History of Religion in 5 1/2 Objects: Bringing the Spiritual to Its Senses.