“Visually Sacred: Conversations on the Power of Images”
Podcast Series Season IV: The Impact and Expression of Material Religion
Hosted by Arthur Aghajanian
FSA is delighted to continue partnering with Christian contemplative and essayist Arthur Aghajanian in featuring the fourth season of his ongoing podcast series “Visually Sacred.” FSA hosts this unique series of important voices that have been intellectually contributing to the conversation of religion and art over the last several decades.
In this streaming podcast series, Arthur Aghajanian explores how images influence our understanding of reality and the sacred through conversations with thought leaders on art, visual culture, and religion. Each episode delves into a different area of visual theology, opening to spiritual wisdom while deconstructing an image-saturated world.
In Season Four, episodes focus on material religion, a field that offers a way to see how images, objects, actions, and spaces participate in making belief tangible. Arthur is joined by a group of guests carefully chosen for their expertise and diverse perspectives. Together they show how material religion manifests in culture, from ancient Christianity to contemporary art, from philosophy and phenomenology to global devotional practices, and from museum work to heritage studies. Their ideas help illuminate how the sacred is expressed, negotiated, contested, and encountered through the material life of faith.
In case you missed them, you can find the previous seasons linked at the bottom of the page.
Image: The Pavilion at Grace Episcopal Church, Providence, RI.
Season IV
Andrew Coates, Duke University lecturer and managing editor of the journal Material Religion introduces the foundations of material religion, explaining how objects, images, and digital media mediate belief and why this interdisciplinary field is reshaping how we understand faith today.
Hillary Kaell, Associate Professor at McGill University, discusses how material religion operates through everyday objects, heritage churches, and global networks of devotion, revealing how faith is lived through commerce, space, and ecological and artistic practice.
Chris Sheklian, Assistant Professor of Religion at Mississippi State University, examines Armenian liturgy as a form of material religion in which images, objects, and sensory practice sustain minority identity, theological meaning, and communal presence across history and diaspora.
Anthony Petro, Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Notre Dame, explores how artists working around the HIV/AIDS crisis and the culture wars used religious images and visual culture to contest power, sexuality, and belief within modern American public life.
Michael J. Crosbie, Professor of Architecture at the University of Hartford, discusses the relationship between architecture and spirituality, focusing on sacred space, spatial justice, and how inclusive, material, and artistic design can make built environments places of welcome and meaning for diverse communities.