The introduction to this special issue describes the emergence of the lived religion approach in relation to other approaches within the study of religion and sociology of religion as a way of going beyond the emphasis on texts and institutions, on the one hand, and the focus on the fate of religion in modern times, on the other hand. It also introduces the aim of this special issue, namely 'theorizing' lived religion. To do this, the authors summarize how the founders of this approach have conceptualized the topic of 'lived religion', adjacent approaches, and the theoretical underpinnings of their work. The authors propose three directions to develop the contribution a lived religion approach might make to theorizing: 1) explicating what is meant by 'religion' by drawing on work that studies religion as a category; 2) explicating how concepts and theories are developed based on lived religion research, with particular emphasis on the way tensions between modernist, disenchanting epistemologies and the enchanted, supernatural worlds of practitioners may inform theory and methodological reflection; 3) anchoring the doing of research, emphasizing the full research cycle in religious studies programs so that students have a solid basis for learning how to move back and forth between carrying out original research and conceptual/theoretical work.
The Orthodox Christian tradition has all too often been sidelined in conversations around contemporary religion. Despite being distinct from Protestantism and Catholicism in both theology and practice, it remains an underused setting for academic inquiry into current lived religious practice. This collection, therefore, seeks to redress this imbalance by investigating modern manifestations of Orthodox Christianity through an explicitly gender-sensitive gaze. By addressing attitudes to gender in this context, it fills major gaps in the literature on both religion and gender. Starting with the traditional teachings and discourses around gender in the Orthodox Church, the book moves on to demonstrate the diversity of responses to those narratives that can be found among Orthodox populations in Europe and North America. Using case studies from several countries, with both large and small Orthodox populations, contributors use an interdisciplinary approach to address how gender and religion interact in contexts such as iconography, conversion, social activism, and ecumenical relations among others. From Greece and Russia to Finland and the USA, this volume sheds new light on the myriad ways in which gender is manifested, performed, and engaged within contemporary Orthodoxy. Furthermore, it also demonstrates that employing the analytical lens of gender enables new insights into Orthodox Christianity as a lived tradition. It will, therefore, be of great interest to scholars of both Religious Studies and Gender Studies.
© helena kupari, ���6 | doi ��.��63/97890043�6743_004 This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC-BY-NC License. CHAPTER 3 Studying Displaced Karelian Orthodox Women The Interviewees My first attempt at getting into contact with displaced Karelian Orthodox women was through a call for written autobiographical submissions that I organized in collaboration with the Finnish Literature Society (FLS). The collection of submissions on the topic of the everyday religion of evacuee Karelian women took place during 2006 and 2007. Quite early on, however, it became clear that it was not going to yield sufficient material for the study.1 Thus, when I composed handouts concerning the collection, I included a mention of the possibility of interviews. These handouts I sent to all 24 Finnish Orthodox parishes and to 73 member associations of the Finnish Karelian League.2 The campaign resulted in just three people expressing their interest to be interviewed. I acquired two more interviewees from among the women who participated in the collection of written material. At this point, I had to acknowledge that my approach was not working. There were simply too few potential informants, Orthodox women of evacuee Karelian background, alive for them to respond in great numbers to written announcements. What was required was face-to-face contact with possible participants. During the winter of 2007-2008, I thus made ten visits to meetings of three different Orthodox lay associations in southern Finland. This proved a better strategy; altogether I located 12 of the informants through these meetings. Furthermore, during the autumn of 2008, other researchers of Karelian culture put me in touch with seven more women, mostly from North Karelia. This final addition allowed me to correct the regional bias of the sample of informants so that they would not only represent the South of Finland.
In the study of lived religion, the focus on laypeople as religious agents can result in the simplistic juxtaposition of religion-as-practised by individuals and religion-asprescribed by institutions. This perspective leads to analyses that over-emphasize agency and overlook the embeddedness of religious persons in intricate power relations that expand beyond the institution(s) closest to them. I propose that Pierre Bourdieu's social theory, particularly as related to the religious field, offers tools for tackling this issue. While Bourdieu's work has been criticized for relegating the laity to the status of passive consumers of religious goods, his theorizations can also be employed to produce nuanced micro-level accounts that prioritize laypeople's practical knowledge of the field and the positions they take within it. Based on my case study of older Finnish women's normative assessments related to religion, I demonstrate how scholars can investigate the role which their informants' histories and investments within the religious field play in their religion-as-lived. The women in my study, lifelong members of Orthodox or Lutheran churches, defended their positions in the increasingly individualistic Finnish religious field through an emphasis on childhood socialization as the foundation of 'proper' religion.
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