Full Description
A Visual Approach to the Study of Religious Orders applies visual methods to the exploration of various facets of religious life, such as everyday lived experience, contemporary monastic identity or monastic architecture. Presenting a series of visual essays, it treats images not as simple illustrations but as an autonomous form of expression, capable of unveiling vital and developmental layers of experience, while inviting readers to examine and interpret the data themselves. The first book of its kind, it brings together case studies from various locations across Europe to demonstrate what the use of visual methodologies can contribute to social scientific research on religious orders. As such, it will appeal to scholars and students of sociology, religious studies and theology and anyone with interests in religious orders.
Contents
1. Introduction: Linking monasteries and religious orders with the visual
2. Photographing friars: Visualising the history of changing Dutch Augustinian identities
3. Nun with a camera: An insider's view (the case of a Russian Orthodox monastery)
4. One year in a Dominican convent in Sudetenland: Religious community in a post-atheistic and post-secular situation
5. Shooting monastic identity: Reflections on photography and spiritual transformation
6. Monastic architecture as a bridge between ecology and spirituality: A case study of a Benedictine monastery in Clerlande, Belgium
7. The lived spirituality of Czech monasteries through architectural materiality
8. Outside, inside - monasteries and monasticism in the local environment: Religion, social memory and economy (the case of Cistercian monasteries in Poland)
9. Photo-elicitation: Visual methods and monasteries. A few preliminary considerations and some results
