ABSTRACT
Julie Byrne, in an introduction to a course entitled “Lived Religion in America: Institutions, Innovations, and Individuals”, explains that the study of “lived religion” “offers that single chewy question to introduce and frame the course: What do we see when we look at religion as lived religion? – and what do we miss?” (Byrne, 2004). For others, lived religion offers scholars the opportunity to move beyond what have and likely will continue to be the dominant foci of the study of religion – namely, the history, texts, hierarchies, philosophy and theology thereof – and turn instead to what is vastly understudied and often misunderstood, the practices and “everyday thinking and doing” of lay people within religious institutions. Hall suggests that while traditional approaches continue to be vital modes of inquiry “we owe a questioning of boundaries, a sympathy for the extra-ecclesial, and a recognition of the laity as actors in their own right” (Hall, 1997, pp. viii–ix). Lived religion, then, can be understood as an approach to the study of religion that embraces those activities, performances, narratives and texts that are often considered inherently meaningless or simply too trivial to merit attention. Religious practice is central to this approach, for it is in practice that the “tensions, the ongoing struggle of definition” come to the fore. Practice, in its varied manifestations, “always bears the marks of both regulation and what, for want of a better word, we may term resistance. It is not wholly one or the other” (Hall, 1997, pp. viii–ix). Nancy Auer Falk grapples with similar issues in an attempt to represent accurate and “lived” accounts of Indian religious traditions, most especially within the study of Hinduism within university class rooms. She suggests that traditional approaches of teaching world religions have tended to privilege belief over practice, very much a remnant of a European Christian heritage. Instead, Falk argues that more accurate portrayals of the religious lives of our students, in particular, include transitioning from primarily historical, theoretical and textual approaches within the study of religion toward a particular focus on the performance of religion as it exists today (Falk, 2006, p. 1).
