When the revolutionary technology of photography erupted in American culture in 1839, it swiftly became, in the day's parlance, a ""mania."" This richly illustrated book positions vernacular photography at the center of the study of nineteenth-century American religious life. As an empirical tool, photography captured many of the signal scenes of American life, from the gold rush to the bloody battlefields of the Civil War. But photographs did not simply display neutral records of people, places, and things; rather, commonplace photographs became inscribed with spiritual meaning, disclosing, not merely signifying, a power that lay beyond. Rachel McBride Lindsey demonstrates that what people beheld when they looked at a photograph had as much to do with what lay outside the frame - with theological expectations, for example - as with what the camera had recorded. Whether studio portraits tucked into Bibles, postmortem portraits with locks of hair attached, ""spirit"" photography, stereographs of the Holy Land, or magic lanterns used in biblical instruction, photographs were curated, beheld, displayed, and valued as physical artifacts that functioned both as relics and as icons of religious practice. Lindsey's interpretation of ""vernacular"" as an analytic introduces a way to consider anew the cultural, social, and material reach of religion.

Building from a range of essays representing multiple fields of expertise and traversing multiple religious traditions, this important text provides analytic rigor to a question now pressing the academic study of religion: what is the relationship between the material and the digital? Its chapters address a range of processes of mediation between the digital and the material from a variety of perspectives and sub-disciplines within the field of religion in order to theorize the implications of these two turns in scholarship, offer case studies in methodology, and reflect on various tools and processes. Authors attend to religious practices and the internet, digital archives of religion, decolonization, embodiment, digitization of religious artefacts and objects, and the ways in which varied relationships between the digital and the material shape religious life. Collectively, the volume demonstrates opportunities and challenges at the intersection of digital humanities and material religion. Rather than defining the bounds of a new field of inquiry, the essays make a compelling case, collectively and on their own, for the interpretive scrutiny required of the humanities in the digital age.

When the revolutionary technology of photography erupted in American culture in 1839, it swiftly became, in the day's parlance, a ""mania."" This richly illustrated book positions vernacular photography at the center of the study of nineteenth-century American religious life. As an empirical tool, photography captured many of the signal scenes of American life, from the gold rush to the bloody battlefields of the Civil War. But photographs did not simply display neutral records of people, places, and things; rather, commonplace photographs became inscribed with spiritual meaning, disclosing, not merely signifying, a power that lay beyond. Rachel McBride Lindsey demonstrates that what people beheld when they looked at a photograph had as much to do with what lay outside the frame - with theological expectations, for example - as with what the camera had recorded. Whether studio portraits tucked into Bibles, postmortem portraits with locks of hair attached, ""spirit"" photography, stereographs of the Holy Land, or magic lanterns used in biblical instruction, photographs were curated, beheld, displayed, and valued as physical artifacts that functioned both as relics and as icons of religious practice. Lindsey's interpretation of ""vernacular"" as an analytic introduces a way to consider anew the cultural, social, and material reach of religion.