The Privilege Of Being Banal

France, officially, is a secular nation. Yet Catholicism is undeniably a monumental presence, defining the temporal and spatial rhythms of Paris. At the same time, it often fades into the background as nothing more than “heritage.” In a creative inversion, Elayne Oliphant asks in The Privilege of Being Banal what, exactly, is hiding in plain sight? Could the banality of Catholicism actually be a kind of hidden power? Exploring the violent histories and alternate trajectories effaced through this banal backgrounding of a crucial aspect of French history and culture, this richly textured ethnography lays bare the profound nostalgia that undergirds Catholicism’s circulation in nonreligious sites such as museums, corporate spaces, and political debates. Oliphant’s aim is to unravel the contradictions of religion and secularism and, in the process, show how aesthetics and politics come together in contemporary France to foster the kind of banality that Hannah Arendt warned against: the incapacity to take on another person’s experience of the world. A creative meditation on the power of the taken-for-granted, The Privilege of Being Banal is a landmark study of religion, aesthetics, and public space.

France, officially, is a secular nation. Yet Catholicism is undeniably a monumental presence, defining the temporal and spatial rhythms of Paris. At the same time, it often fades into the background as nothing more than "heritage." In a creative inversion, Elayne Oliphant asks in The Privilege of Being Banal what, exactly, is hiding in plain sight? Could the banality of Catholicism actually be a kind of hidden power? Exploring the violent histories and alternate trajectories effaced through this banal backgrounding of a crucial aspect of French history and culture, this richly textured ethnography lays bare the profound nostalgia that undergirds Catholicism's circulation in non-religious sites such as museums, corporate spaces, and political debates. Oliphant's aim is to unravel the contradictions of religion and secularism and, in the process, show how aesthetics and politics come together in contemporary France to foster the kind of banality that Hannah Arendt warned against: the incapacity to take on another person's experience of the world. A creative meditation on the power of the taken-for-granted, The Privilege of Being Banal is a landmark study of religion, aesthetics, and public space.

This book is the first to focus on material visualities of bhakti imagery that inspire, shape, convey, and expand both the visual practices of devotional communities, as well as possibilities for extending the reach of devotion in society in new and often unexpected ways. Communities of interpreters of bhakti images discussed in this book include not only a number of distinctive Hindu bhakti groups, but also artisans, diaspora women, South Asian Sufis, businessmen, dancers, and filmmakers. This book's identification of devotional practices of looking, such as materializing memory, mirroring and immaterializing portraits, and shaping the return look, connect material and visual cultures as well as illustrate modes of established and experimental image usage. Bhakti is one of the most-studied aspects of Indic devotionalism on account of its expression through emotive poetry, song, and vivid hagiographies of saints. The diverse devotional visualities analyzed in this book meaningfully circulate bhakti images in past and present, generating their renewed relationship to contemporary concerns.

This book focuses on the ethnographic study of Catholicism and media. Chapters demonstrate how people engage with the Catholic media-scape, and analyse the social, cultural, and political processes that underlie Catholic media and mediatization. Case studies examine Catholic practices in North America, Western and Eastern Europe, Latin America, South-East Asia, and Africa, providing a truly comparative, de-centred representation of global Catholicism. Illustrating the vibrancy and heterogeneity of Catholicism world-wide, the book also examines how media work to sustain larger global Catholic imaginaries.

"This book offers a new theoretical framework for exploring contemporary pilgrimage, exploring examples ranging from the Hajj to the Camino, and arguing that pilgrimage activity should be understood not solely as going to, staying at, and leaving a sacred place, but also as occurring in apparently mundane or domestic times, places, and practices"--

"Kindred Spirits focuses on a network of Catholic historians, theologians, poets, and activists who pushed against both the far-right surge in interwar Europe as well as the secularizing tendencies of the leftist movements active in the early to mid-twentieth century. Brenna Moore focuses on how this group sought a middle way anchored in "spiritual friendship"-religiously meaningful friendship conceived of as uniquely capable of engaging the social and political challenges of the era. For this interconnected group, spiritual friendship was inseparable from their resistance to European xenophobia and nationalism in the 1930s, anti-racist activism in the US in the 1930s and 1940s, and solidarity with Muslims during the Algerian War in 1954-1962. Friendship was a key to both divine and human realms, a means of accessing the transcendent while also engaging with our social and political existence. The project primarily centers on France, but members of this group also hailed from Russia, Egypt, Syria, and New York. Some of the core figures are well-known-philosopher Jacques Maritain, influential Islamicist Louis Massignon-while others are lost to history. More than a simple idealized portrait of a remarkable group of Catholic intellectuals from the past, Kindred Spirits is a deep dive into both the beauty and the flaws of a vibrant social network worth recovering from historical obscurity"--

Ask a random American what springs to mind about Sedona, Arizona, and they will almost certainly mention New Age spirituality. Nestled among stunning sandstone formations, Sedona has built an identity completely intertwined with that of the permanent residents and throngs of visitors who insist it is home to powerful vortexes—sites of spiraling energy where meditation, clairvoyance, and channeling are enhanced. It is in this uniquely American town that Susannah Crockford took up residence for two years to make sense of spirituality, religion, race, and class. Many people move to Sedona because, they claim, they are called there by its special energy. But they are also often escaping job loss, family breakdown, or foreclosure. Spirituality, Crockford shows, offers a way for people to distance themselves from and critique current political and economic norms in America. Yet they still find themselves monetizing their spiritual practice as a way to both “raise their vibration” and meet their basic needs. Through an analysis of spirituality in Sedona, Crockford gives shape to the failures and frustrations of middle- and working-class people living in contemporary America, describing how spirituality infuses their everyday lives. Exploring millenarianism, conversion, nature, food, and conspiracy theories, Ripples of the Universe combines captivating vignettes with astute analysis to produce a unique take on the myriad ways class and spirituality are linked in contemporary America.

"The story Modern tells ranges from eighteenth-century brain anatomies to the MRI; from the spread of phrenological cabinets and mental pieties in the nineteenth century to the discovery of the motor cortex and the emergence of the brain wave as a measurable manifestation of cognition; from cybernetic research into neural networks and artificial intelligence to the founding of brain-centric religious organizations such as Scientology; from the deployments of cognitive paradigms in electric shock treatment to the work of Barbara Brown, a neurofeedback pioneer who promoted the practice of controlling one's own brainwaves in the 1970s. What Modern reveals via this grand tour is that our ostensibly secular turn to the brain is bound up at every turn with the 'religion' it discounts, ignores, or actively dismisses. Nowhere are science and religion closer than when they try to exclude each other, at their own peril"--