ABSTRACT
I write this book because I see and hear the sacred all around me as a performer interested in religion and culture. Often I fi nd this reality for me, and many others, is not a topic of discussion in theatre and performance studies, or even religious studies. While performance studies in religion is a growing fi eld, and reviving discussion about religion in culture, I wanted to explore what I saw was missing is much of the literature that dealt with this topic. That is, examining how profoundly religion and values affect everything we do in life, not just rituals or acts that are considered obviously religious. We are always performing our religion, and that performance simply is amplifi ed in theatrical performance. As a scholar, I knew theatre, dance, and the arts had attracted the attention of Rudolph Otto, Geradiaus Van Der Lieuw, Emile Durkheim, and then especially Martin Buber and Paul Tillich. 1 Other scholarship seemed overly focused on specifi c non-Western cultures; while such focus may be necessary to avoid sweeping generalizations about religion, ritual, and theatre, the tendency may be to avoid discussion about how one might study religion and culture as a whole. Yet in a global, multicultural age, there seems to be a need to consider religion as performance, and reexamine the place of the arts and spirituality in a society, and especially Western society.
