Rearranging Things: How Protestant attitudes shake the objects in the piety of Eastern Christian Women

Abstract

This article considers the objects in the piety of Lebanese women who originally come from Antiochian Orthodox and Maronite traditions and who by marriage join the Protestant Church. Objects that are normally inconspicuous -even "invisible" -in their faith collide with Protestant attitudes and are shaken by dissonant theological concepts. Yet these objects and images retain something of the holy in them and the women hesitate about their total elimination. In this murky situation, things are de-familiarized and yet re-emerge as active, flexible agents with which individual theologies are written and connections are achieved. It explains how the things that furnish the lives of these women are shifted and re-centered rather than destroyed or eliminated.