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David Newheiser et al., "Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
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Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network and if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the new New Books Network.
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This is Carrie Lynn Evans welcoming you back to New Books in Secularism, a podcast channel on the New Books Network today. I'm looking forward to sharing with you Art Making as Spiritual Practice Rituals of Embodied Understanding edited by Professor David Neuheiser. This new collection asks if it's possible to consider art making as a spiritual practice independent of explicit religious belief or content. Where earlier research has focused on the religious significance of secular artworks, this innovative volume turns its attention to the role of the artist and to specific examples of art practices, putting them into conversation with ritual practices. By creating a web of connections that emerge across multiple disciplines and practices, a team of scholars and artists shed new light on the way art making and ritual embody non discursive forms of understanding. Drawing on the work of scholars who argue that ritual practice is central to religious identities, they use close analysis of specific examples to address philosophical issues about the nature of knowledge and spirituality and the relationship between them. Art Making Is Spiritual Practice is a rich and in depth examination of the possibility that art has spiritual meanings that are endemic to the practice of art making itself, establishing a new paradigm that changes the conversation surrounding the spiritual, if not religious, significance of art. Professor David Neuheiser is a returning champion on new books and secularism. He joined us in 2020 to talk about his book Hope in a Secular Deconstruction, Negative Theology and the Future of faith. And in 2023, he told us about his edited collection, the Varieties of Atheism. Links to those episodes will be included in the show notes and on the blog post. He is associate professor of religion at Florida State University with research that explores the role of religious traditions in debates over ethics, politics, and culture. He received a PhD in religion from the University of Chicago and an MPhil in early Christian Thought from Oxford. He is also co editor of the Journal for the Academic Study of Religion, and he joins me today to discuss his latest project. All right, three, two, one. Hello everybody, and welcome back to New Books and Secularism. David, thank you so much for being here.
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Thanks, Carrie. Great to talk with you.
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B
So let's start with you as we usually do. It looks like you've had some career movements since the last time we've had the opportunity to chat. So tell us, where are you at these days?
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A
Yeah, I lived for the last 10 years in Melbourne, Australia. I was a senior research fellow at Australian Catholic University. But 12 months ago I arrived in Tallahassee, Florida, where I'm now an associate professor in the religion department at Florida State. And it seemed like a good time to arrive in the United States. Democracy is under threat. Higher education is highly politicized and under enormous pressure. And I really loved life in Australia. My partner and I became citizens while we were there. Life was very good and we miss Australia in many ways. But it felt like an important time to come back to the US Especially to work at a at a public university, because it seems like an important time to make the case that education is a public good and it ought to be available to everyone.
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B
Oh, good for you. Oh, that's wonderful to hear. All right. Well, next I want to ask you how the idea for this very unique book came to be, because it is very unique as we'll get into. So. Yeah. How did it happen?
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One of the things about this book is that it really comes out of a community that formed that was in sustained conversation. So the co editor of the of the book, Lexi Eichelbum, and I, we had an idea for a project that would think about the intersection between art and religion. And we got funding from the Templeton Religion Trust and put together an interdisciplinary group of scholars in Melbourne, where we were based at the time, in order to get at the question of art and religion in a new kind of way. So there's been a lot of stuff that's been written about the religious resonances in secular art. Religious ideas that might have some kind of symbolic representation in works of art that aren't explicitly coded as religious. Or sometimes there's work about the sort of spiritual biography of artists like Mark Rothko or other people who have some sort of spiritual dimension to their biography. And so that becomes a lens through which their work is viewed. We wanted to bracket both the symbolic content of artwork and also the question of the artist's own commitments and come at the question in a new way by thinking about particular practices that artists engage in and how those practices might be similar to or different from in interesting ways, the practices that religious people engage in. So in order to get at this question, we put together this interdisciplinary group in Melbourne. And I think There were about 12 of us, 12 or 14. And every two weeks we would, over the course of a year we would visit the studio of an artist based in Melbourne, people working in different media, painting, video art, landscape art, performance art, other things. And we would spend a couple of hours in really detailed conversation with the artist in the place where they do their work, thinking in a really fine grained way about what it looks like for artists to work, what are the patterns, the habits, the practices that they engage in, what does their creative process look like? Not in the sort of. There's often a kind of mythology that's told about the sort of undetermined creativity of the artist, which is, you know, that's an interesting part of the story of art. But we were interested in the sort of fine grained details about the. Yeah, this material practices that artists engage in. And so we asked this group, each of them wrote. Each member of this group wrote an essay about one of our artists that was thinking about the way in which the material practices they engaged in helped them to see or help them to know certain things. So we were trying to think about artistic practice as providing an access to something that's more than just about aesthetics, more than just about feelings, but that provided some kind of insight into the world. And so that was the first stage of the project and that provided the kind of core as a second stage. We brought a second group of people for intensive conversation over the course of three or four days at a conference where we reflected on the work that was done by the first Group. So we thought about the practices that artists were engaged in in relation to practices of religious ritual. Because one thing about religion is that like art, sometimes religion is construed as something that's mainly about symbolic or ideological content, about what people, what people think, what they imagine. But a lot of scholars of religion have argued that ritual is really central to what religious traditions consist. In that what people do with their bodies, repetitive, meaningful tasks that might be oriented towards the sacred, that this sort of shapes how religious traditions actually live, shapes people's experience of it. So with the second group of scholars, we ask them to think about each of them, to think about a specific religious ritual and answer the same kind of question. How does that religious ritual, how does that relate to insight or knowledge or understanding in, in some way? And the collection puts those two conversations together. So each, each of the essays on one of our artists is paired with an. An essay on a religious ritual around a certain theme. So we'll talk in detail about each of the themes. But basically the idea is to, is to. To try to offer a new perspective on the relationship between art and religion by unfolding these material practices and the deeper meaning that they have.
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Yeah, I really like the dimension of the knowledge bringing dimension of artistic practice that you're talking about because some of my work has also looked at the way we're really living in times that prioritize technology and technical knowledge and logical ability and statistical information and de emphasizing the epistemological. Epistemological value, excuse me, of creative stuff. And so this is a completely different way than I've been looking at it, but a very different way of saying, you know, there's a lot of knowledge value in creative practice. So that really ties into what your co editor, Lexi Eichelboom was talking about in the introduction that she wrote. And that's the idea of making art a distinct practice of knowledge. So I just loved that idea. And she was elaborating that artistic practice involves elements like repetitive action, like you were saying, artistic choices, engagement with chance, matter, time, space. And through this, artists develop unique knowledge through these practices. Yeah, so I, for myself, I'm also arguing that creative processes are distinct practices of knowledge, specifically like storytelling. But yeah, I thought maybe you could elaborate a little bit further on that idea's significance and how it connects, especially to notions of spirituality.
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So yeah, as you said, my co editor Alexi Heichlboom wrote an introduction that's unpacking the thematic of knowledge that I gestured at a moment ago. And I think the key idea is that knowledge is often framed as, in fairly narrow terms, as involving sort of holding propositions in your head that correspond in some sense to the. To the way that the world is. And one of the things that I think is useful about thinking about art as a source of knowledge, or in your case, myth and science fiction as a source of knowledge, is that it expands our sense of what it means to know things, on the one hand. So one of the. I think the implicit conception of knowledge that runs through the book is something that may be better captured by terms like understanding or insight. So it's not the kind of flattened understanding of knowledge that some forms of philosophy sometimes rely on, but it's. It's a kind of access to the. To the world that can't necessarily be captured in propositional statements. But that it. But. But it's still. It still has a kind of. Still has a kind of weight, a weight to it as a. As a way of understanding how things are. But in the second place. So you and I were talking off mic just before we started recording about your work on science fiction, which I. Which I love, and you mentioned Foucault as a point of reference. I mean, Foucault is very important for me. He's a really important source for my chapter, the first chapter in the book, which is on similar themes. And one of the things that Foucault brings out is that knowledge is inseparable from questions of power. So one of the reasons to foreground the significance of knowledge in these conversations about art, I think, is to. Is to get at the way in which traditions like the system of modern art that emerged in the early modern period, they brought into being new ways of understanding and knowing the world. But also those new conceptions of knowledge were linked to new systems of power. Which is not to say that there's something necessarily pernicious about them, but insofar as art is a way that people have sought to encounter, to understand the world, to find some kind of insight, I think it's important to see the way in which art also shapes people. It shapes the way that people imagine the way that they feel, the way that they inhabit the world. And as I try to describe in my own chapter, it also has had really concrete political effects. So, for instance, on the way in which non European people, the way in which their cultural production has sometimes been dismissed as not amounting to fine art, on the terms of European definitions of what art is, but conversely, that non European people have sometimes taken up the category of art in order to achieve their political aims by making use of the power that's in these concepts. So thinking about art and knowledge together, I think is a way to bring to light the relationship between understanding and power that rests in something like art, but also religion in a different way.
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B
Well, that's a great way of segueing into the context. I had wanted to ask you about the context of this discussion. We're currently seeing a general decline in religiosity worldwide, just broadly speaking. As you write in chapter one, some people see art as creating opportunities for a sense of secular spiritualism, whereas others feel strongly that art and religion are separate domains. So highly theoretical debates. But can you get us up to speed on the strands of that debate and if you can, how we got here as well?
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A
Yeah, I mean, they're theoretical debates, but also really concrete. So one thing that a number of art theorists. James Elkins is a really influential theorist of religion and art. He describes the way in which, for much of the 20th century, exhibitions or works of art that had some kind of explicitly religious themes or orientation, that they. That they were less likely to find a home in the. The most influential galleries and museums, that they were less likely to be covered in influential journals of contemporary art like Art Forum or other other outlets. That there was a kind of anxiety that Elkins himself seems to endorse, which is that religion, on this understanding, is restrictive. It is associated with sort of dogmatic doctrine and hierarchical systems of regulating people's beliefs and behavior. And art, on the other hand, was understood as giving a space to a kind of undetermined creativity. And on this understanding, art and religion were just at odds that religion couldn't have a place in the art world because the religion asserts an orthodoxy, and art as an institution is fundamentally hostile to any kind of orthodoxy. So that's an assumption that I think a lot of people have about art. But one thing that some scholars have noticed in the last 15 or 20 years is that there have been more and more exhibitions in secular art institutions that seem to be playing with religious themes. So there are a number of contemporary artists who are interested in sort of playing with religious motifs, but also some exhibitions that I think 20 years ago would have been really surprising. So in my chapter, I describe the experience of being in London. I was in London in 2023, and at the National Gallery, which is a sort of home center for art for the. For the uk It's a really important sort of cultural institution. There was an exhibition focused on St. Francis of Assisi. And so even in the title, you know, it wasn't just Francis of Assisi, but they sort of named him as a saint. And they displayed both artistic depictions of Francis by contemporary artists like Gormley and others, but also medieval Renaissance portrayals of the saint. But they also portrayed some relics that were associated with the saints. So things like the habit that Francis wore and the sash, which in a religious context, they, they would have been venerated as relics. They would have been a site for religious people to focus their sort of prayers in the museum. They weren't given that kind of religious framing. But one of the things I noticed is that these objects, in the way that they were displayed, they were breath lit, the room was dim. People were circling around quietly in silence and ruminating, meditating, reflecting on, on these objects. It seemed like there was something that was kind of ritualistic about the space. And one thing I realized as I, as I sort of reflected on this experience is that there have been. There's been this really influential stream of research on the, on the history of art that argues that you can't really understand contemporary art as a cultural formation without thinking about this rich dimensions. So the classic text is a book called Civilizing Rituals by Carol Duncan. And Duncan shows how the art museums like the Louvre and the National Gallery in London, other important art museums, were actually created in the early modern period in order to shape the population into a certain kind of citizenship. So even though they were sort of framed as being about giving the population access to aesthetic experience and beauty, there were various ways in which the public. For instance, when the Louvre opened, people had to be told to walk slowly, to speak quietly. They needed to be inculcated into certain practices of ritual reverence, essentially for the works that were there. And the museums were set up in a different way. So before this new sort of institution of the public art museum was set up, art was often displayed in private homes of wealthy people in order to allow elite men almost always to display their knowledge of different artistic schools. So often the same kind of scene, a certain kind of landscape, for instance, would be displayed together so that people could notice the way in which a given landscape was depicted in different ways by different artists from different places. Italy, France and elsewhere. But in the, in museums like the Louvre, art was arranged in a way that was given a different kind of frame. It was, it was organized historically, it was rationalized in a certain way in order to educate a broad public about, about art, to sort of give them a different kind of lens to see it. So anyway, the point is just that, as Duncan and others have argued, these museums weren't simply neutral spaces for people to experience beauty, but they were ritualized spaces that were intended to shape a population into certain habits in much the same way that religious rituals have been developed in order to shape religious observance. And so this for me is an important example of the way in which, as I mentioned a moment ago, the dimension of art as having, having some kind of understanding or insight embedded within it. And then the, the sort of power that is exerted by systems of art are. They're intertwined, they're not separable. And so I think that using religious traditions as a lens and thinking about how ritual brings to light certain features of art that might otherwise be missed, I think it helps to clarify this nexus of, of knowledge and power that I find so, so interesting. VRBO helps you swap gift wrap time for quality time. 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Yeah, that is interesting. And as you were talking, I was thinking about how so often it seems like we just can't get away from wanting art to be didactic, like a little bit simplistically so sometimes it seems to me at points in history and that in itself implies the knowledge potential of art. Right. Which is cool.
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A
Just one brief note about that. I mean, I think the didactic point is a great one and I think one of the things that is so useful about using ritual as a lens is that it shows that the didactic power of art isn't simply in the sort of ideas that art conveys, but it's in the, in the habits that it inculcates, the sort of bodily practices. And for me, one, one archive or one body of work that's helped me to see this in a new way. I mentioned having recently moved back to the US from Australia. While I was living in Australia, I had the chance to learn in a way that I never, never knew much about Australian Aboriginal art. But in my chapter in the book, much of it is about these Australian artistic traditions because they, they sort of encapsulate the, the power of this, the sort of didactic function of art, the fact that it, the fact that it carries such cultural prestige. The art of Aboriginal people was originally dismissed by the first settlers to Australia because the Aboriginal people were understood as being primitive. They were often called savages. And so the painting that they produced was Dismissed as uninteresting. But over the course of the first hundred years after. After settlement, it became subject to increasing public interest. Australia, white Australian collectors began to sort of recognize its aesthetic power. They began to collect it. And then internationally, especially dot painting from the. From the center of Australia. But other forms of Aboriginal painting as well came to be valued really highly internationally. And one of the things as I describe is that the cultural power of art was a tool that Aboriginal people used in the battle for land rights. So in order to try to achieve equality and to try to win legal recognition for land that had been expropriated, often by industry, the. These Aboriginal paintings were often really instrumental in communicating the power of the culture to white Australians. And for Aboriginal artists, one of the things that they just. To sort of close the loop, one of the things that they described is that for them, the power of these works couldn't be abstracted, that there was something in the materiality of them. Often the. The designs that were painted on bark, for instance, I'm especially interested in bark painting from the Northern Territory Territory Yolnu and Kunwinku painting painted on bark using pigments that were drawn from particular places that were also depicted on the bark. And so there is this telescoping relationship between the designs on the bark, the pigment that was used to paint them, and the places in the landscape that were understood as embodying a kind of spiritual power. And so for these Aboriginal painters, these works of bark painting really carried a profound power that was profoundly didactic for Australian culture.
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B
Oh, that's great. So let's move on to the individual themes. The first one up is movement. And our artist for this theme is Heather Hesterman. But the theoretical chapter for this section by Natalie Carnes explores, quote, ritual through the lens of movement, specifically the movement involved in the Catholic Eucharist, seeking what we can learn about a sense of vulnerability in this ritual. So can you tell us what she means by this and how it connects to Heather Hesterman's artistic practices, like her Sound Walk, for example?
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A
Yeah, so there's a. There's a lot. There's a lot in the relationship between Natalie's chapter on the Eucharist and then Heather. So just to. Just so that your readers can envision what we're describing. So the. The central section of the book is comprised in a way that I mentioned. I'll just describe it again. There are, I think, how many? Seven pairs of essays. So the first in each pair is on a religious ritual, and then the second essay in Each pair is on the practice of a particular artist, and each pair is linked by a sort of central thematic category. So movement is the first one and we'll talk about the others. But, but between each of these essays, in each, in each case, between each pair, there's a brief reflection by the artist whose work is discussed. So in this initial set on movement, there's an essay by Natalie Carnes, who's a theologian, on the movements in the Eucharist and the theme of vulnerability. It's a brief reflection by an artist, Melbourne based landscape artist Heather Hesterman, and then an essay by scholar of religion Alison Fitchett Kleimanhega, on Heather Hestermann's practice on the. On the importance of movement for Hesterman. So that's just to say that you're asking about the connections between these, these essays, and we intentionally left them somewhat implicit, so I'm not gonna. It would be difficult to make them explicit because we wanted the readers to play around and discover what links each of these clusters and groups. But I can say briefly that Heather Esterman's practice is centered on movement insofar as she's a landscape artist, so her medium is closely related to the land. It is, in many cases, reflecting on the, the importance of land and country for the Aboriginal Australian traditions that I was discussing a moment ago. And one thing that we did when we, when our group spent time with Heather Hesterman is that we went through a. Went on a walk with her through a landscape in central Melbourne, so a parkland. And Heather invited us to attend in ways that people don't normally attend to the landscape as they walk through it, because it's a place where people are, you know, people are jogging and cycling and walking their dogs and having conversations and drinking coffee, whatever they're doing. People drink all kinds of things. But Heather led us through this walk through the landscape in a way to help us to access a kind of attunement. So in Heather's essay, one of the things she describes is this idea of attunement that anthropologists like Anna Singh used to describe a kind of, kind of encounter that's often directed towards more than human species. So Alison Fitcher Kleinhage's essay is sort of unpacking that idea of movement and the relationship between movement and attunement and the way in which that constitutes a kind of knowledge. Alison for me, her essay is one of the, the most clarifying places in the collection where the theme of knowledge in relation to art comes into focus, especially in relation to art as a social practice. And then in connection with that, there's this essay that sort of sits alongside. It doesn't engage tremendously explicitly with it, but there are lots of shared themes. This essay by Natalie Carnes on the Eucharist and one of the things that Natalie describes is that the Eucharist is one of the central rituals for Christians. It's in Natalie's focused on a specifically Catholic celebration. But in Protestant traditions, similar ritual is described as in terms of the Lord's Supper, commemorating the Passover meal before the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. And in the Catholic version of the Eucharist that Natalie is unpacking, there's. There's a ritual movement that begins with offering. The priest offers prayers. The people stand, pray the Lord's prayer, cue walk forward to. To take the bread and the wine that are the sort of central elements. And one of the things that. That Natalie Carnes is unpacking is the way in which these movements, they embody something that feminist theorists have described as vulnerability. So Natalie talks about this important book, the Body Keeps the Score, about trauma. There are feminists who have reflected on themes of vulnerability in similar terms. And one of the things that Natalie's drawing out is that the Eucharist takes place. It takes place in a kind of safe environment in order to. In her description, to encourage a kind of responsiveness. So one of the problems with the experience of trauma is that vulnerability can be lost. There can be mechanisms of defensiveness that are. That are set up. Learning to. Learning to connect and respond to others again is an important part of recovery from trauma. And so Carnes interprets the ritual of the Eucharist and the role of movement within it as a way to try to learn or relearn this kind of vulnerability and responsiveness.
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B
Interesting. The next section, the theme is time. It starts with Marco Ghislani's discussion of the concepts of sacred time within ritual. And then the secular historical time in which ritual is situated, which is a super interesting idea. And on how these ideas have been affected by anthropological and sometimes Orientalist influences, which I didn't expect either. There's a lot to unpack there. Can you take us through that?
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A
Yeah. I mean, it's a really exquisitely crafted essay. So I sort of. I feel like the best I can do is to invite readers to find it because it's really worth sitting with. I don't think there's an easy way to encapsulate it, but I can say that the sort of central Core of the essay is Marker reflects on Vedic reflections on time and the role of ritual. And especially the Rite of Indra's Banners is the sort of ceremony that he focuses on as a way to think about the. The place of time in these traditions. And Marco describes that ritual and its. And its power in a way that's really vivid and beautiful, but then uses that as a lens to think about the. The work of anthropologists, scholars of religion, like Talal Assad on. On ritual and its relationship to. To time. So, yeah, it's a really, really beautiful and intricately crafted reflection that sort of interweaves this Vedic ritual with, with scalpership on ritual and that in the, in the section of the book. So time, as you've said, is the theme in this cluster. The artist who's, whose reflection is at the center of this conversation is another Melbourne based artist, a painter, Adam Lee, who paints these really sort of beautiful, vivid, sometimes chaotic, large canvases, very colorful, moving, oblique. And one of the things that's so compelling about Adam's work, I think, is that often the religious resonance of the work isn't explicit. He's not, he's not painting work that is full of explicitly religious motifs and themes. But in his reflection, Adam explains that he understands painting. He calls it a form of votive making, which votive objects are used in a range of different religious traditions. A sort of focal point for prayer, yearning, hope, lament. And so, even though his work isn't explicitly coded as religious, Adam draws on scholars of art and religion, like David Morgan, for instance, to think about the way in which his paintings have a kind of votive power. They're dynamic, especially in the way that they try to encourage a certain relationship to time. And that's the theme that in the sort of final piece in this cluster on Time by Alda Bother Blueis, she reflects on time in the practice of Adam Lee's painting. And one of the things that Alda brings out in a way that's, I think, really instructive for the collection as a whole is that painting is something that happens over time. So in her conversations with Adam Lee and in the visit that we made to his studio, it became clear that the process of painting has a kind of power for Lee, you know, it's not something that happens all at once. But he begins by composing parts of the painting in pencil before completing pictures in watercolor. He paints oil paintings that have a different kind of duration, given the way that the medium works, the affordances of the paint and the canvas. And so Alda, in a way that speaks in ways that are, I think, oblique, but quite, quite compelling, speaks to the place of time and its importance and ritual that Marco Glastani's essay brings out.
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B
Fantastic. Let's turn now to our next theme, that of medium. And in this chapter, Jonathan A. Anderson begins by describing a very interesting video art installation by Arthur Jaffa, which I thought sounded almost like a video collage. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it comprised of video clips of Christian materials like sermons and songs, like, such an interesting idea. And so Anderson uses this as a way to talk about the way that different mediums can produce different rituals of transformation. So tell us about this and then if you can, connect it to the multimedia process of Chris Bond's work.
- [38:34]
A
Yeah, so again, I mean, there's a. There's a beautiful nexus of themes that is sitting here for readers to discover. But I'll just say briefly that Jonathan Anderson's essay. So Anderson has just published a really interesting book that reflects on some of these themes around art and religion. So he brings a really rich experience to this video artist, Arthur Jaffa, who, as you say, has this work that incorporates sermons and other experiences from Christian worship. And one of the things that Anderson brings out is the place of the recording of the sermon. The way that Jaffa uses it in. In his video art offers different ways to access the ritual event that is being depicted. So there's a. There's a sermon, there's a recording of the sermon. There's this. There's this video art that uses the recording of the sermon. Each of them is different in terms of its. In terms of its medium. And as Anderson brings out, that affects its significance. It sort of gives viewers a different kind of perspective on these ritually charged events. And one of the things that's so interesting, of course, for our collection, is that this work is not. Even though it involves in a way that most of the art in this collection doesn't, it involves religiously coded work. It's not presented as a. As a specifically religious work. I mean, it's not presented as if it's intended to serve a religious purpose per se, but the fact that ritual is being depicted centrally in the work. Anderson brings out how that brings to light something about the. Relate. About the place of ritual in relation to art. And Anderson sort of unpacks this in relation to themes of space and sound and time, so interweaving with some of the themes that other essays in the collection are reflecting on. So the artist whose reflection Stands at the center of this cluster on medium is Chris Bond as a Melbourne based artist who's work is formally really creative. So Chris makes these really sort of beautiful drawings and paintings that are often reproducing or sort of reworking archival works that Bond has found. And Bond reflects in a really interesting way about how about how recreating these. These works offers him a different kind of understanding or access to the. To the world. And that's something that the. The sort of third piece in this cluster is. Is an essay about Bond's work by Cillian Quigley, who is a scholar of. Of literature. He brings out the. The role of medium in. In Bond's painting practice. So the. One of the examples that Quigley gives is Bond has a exquisitely detailed pencil drawing that is recreating an oil painting by Albert bierstadt from the 19th century of. Of the Bay at Capri. And so the painting itself is beautiful, vivid, colorful. Bond makes his own version of the scene in a way that is closely mimicking it. But it's not the same because as opposed to oil on canvas, in Bond's case, it's graphite on paper. And so one of the things that Killian Quigley unpacks is the way in which this shift in. In medium sort of tells us something important about the place of medium in art and the way in which it shapes the creation of art as a practice.
- [43:09]
B
Yeah, it looked really pretty.
- [43:12]
A
It's pretty.
- [43:12]
B
Yeah. Let's move next to the idea of subtraction. And I have to say, as I was moving through these themes, I was just like, wow, I would have never thought of that as a theme in either ritual or in art. So super interesting. So it opens with Elaine Oliphant's theoretical chapter on subtraction in Art and ritual. And interestingly, she starts by kind of interrogating the premise of the entire book itself, this presumed connection between art and ritual. And she proposes that what they have in common is the ways they are often presented as what she calls universalizing gestures. In other words, people present them in ways that attempt to subtract the cultural and political context from our understanding of them. So subtraction in that sense. Furthermore, she discusses the tendency to attempt to subtract the artist's agency from their production as well. I know there's been times in literature where this was seen as a virtue. The new. It was called new criticism. The idea that the artistic work stood on its own. You didn't want to or need to know absolutely anything about the artist or the author or the context that was contributing to it. You had everything you would ever need to know contained within the artistic practice. So she's, I'm assuming she's gesturing to something very similar in the fine arts world there. So I was wondering if, yeah, you could talk to us about some of those ideas and how they connect to the educational performance art of Angela Clark and Camilla Mehling, otherwise known as Live Particle.
- [44:55]
A
Yeah. So Elaine Oliphant is someone who's thought a lot about these questions about secular art and its relation to religion. She has written a book which I, which I really love, called the Privilege of Being Banal, which is about art, secularism and Catholicism in Paris. So Elaine, she's trained as an anthropologist. She brings a really rich, fine grained understanding of how art and religion intersect in particular contexts. And the concern that she describes is something that under the force of, for critique, I found it really beneficial to sort of think about, as I was reflecting on the shape of a connection, which, as you say, is this idea that art, ritual, religion, they're categories that are often used to abstract, sort of subtract the material context and through a kind of universalizing gesture that is related to Western European colonial history, which something, as I, you know, I've briefly described my own chapter was really shaped by thinking about this critique of, of Alain's. I mean, the place that I, the thing that I try to do in my framing chapter at the start of the collection is to show along the lines that Oliphant describes the way in which the concepts of art and religion emerge at a particular point in early modern Europe. And as I've said in the case of Australian Aboriginal bark painting, the categories of art and religion were both used in the colonial encounter in many cases to disparage diminish non European cultures. And so I think she's exactly right about that. The thing that I try to describe as a way to take that critique seriously is that these categories have also been subject to new use. So Aboriginal people are one example of many of people who have taken up these categories actually transformed their meaning in order to draw power from them, to make use of the power that they carry for the, the project of political equality. But anyway, Oliphant's critique I think is really, is really trenchant and that relates in ways that are, I think, really oblique and suggestive to the artists that are at the center of this cluster on subtraction, who, as you say, Camilla Mailing and Angela Clark work under the name Live Particle and they work with movement is the. I guess, the best way to describe the medium that they use. So they often will use objects to create experiences for the. I don't know what the right word is exactly. Viewers of their art or the recipients of their art to interact with. And so one of the things they try to explore are the way in which the encounter with art is tactile, embodied, visceral, kinetic and. Yeah, so in the final essay in this cluster, Mauricio Toscano is philosopher reflects on the way in which life particles, movement art tells us something about subtraction as a. As a motif, as a theme that helps us to see something about how our practice functions, the kind of insight that it. That it carries. So he uses Heidegger as a theoretical lens to think about the. The way in which a certain kind of ascetic gesture, a sort of subtraction or setting aside, can allow for something that might otherwise be missed to emerge. Can. Can allow for a sort of experience or encounter with the world to become known in a way that's difficult in the. In the sort of welter of everyday life, the habits that are established in the ways that people normally move through the world. And so Toscano interprets this movement, art from life particle as a kind of displacement away from distraction is a phrase that he uses as a way to try to set aside things that distract in order to bring to light features of the world and our experience that we might miss otherwise.
- [49:54]
B
So next the book turns to the theme of invention. Molly Farnath uses the traditional Jewish liturgical prayer Alenu to explore the continuum between invention and repetition in ritual and highlight the significance of invention's role, which is often overlooked in something that we tend to imagine as being mostly about repetition. So similarly under recognized perhaps is the role of invention, inventive perception in thinking about or responding to art, which is, you know, we would maybe usually think of that as being merely receptive. And so artist Dominic Redfern tries to bring to the fore that very idea in his photographic work. Do I have that right?
- [50:41]
A
Yeah, yeah. So Dominic works with photography, also video art. So he. Yeah, he. He works in. With media in a way that are really, really creative. Yeah. And yeah, I mean, I. I think I am sketching for our listeners the, the ways in which these. These essays cluster to some extent. The. A lot of the essays in this book speak to each other sort of across these thematic boundaries. So I think the thematic structure is somewhat. Somewhat ad hoc, ad hoc and artificial. But, you know, the essays are sort of placed next to each other so that hopefully things will spark. So in this case, I think the concept of invention is fairly abstract and its significance here is somewhat elusive. But what these three pieces share. So, as you've said, Molly Farnath reflects on this Jewish ritual of the Ale Nu. And then there's a brief reflection from Dominic Redfern on his art practice as a video artist. And then Benjamin Despain writes about the place of invention in Redfern's video practice. The idea, I think it's expressed most clearly in Farnath's essay. I mean, so far scholar of religion who thinks in ways that are really clear and compelling about religious practices, the way in which traditions both provide a kind of structure, but also a space for invention of various kinds. So she recently published a really great book on the politics of ritual, which everybody should read, that thinks about the way in which ritual is not simply a sort of conservative or restrictive force, but that there's space for sort of reinvention that's politically potent. And Farnath is thinking across, thinking about ritual as a broad category across both religious and non religious traditions. And so in this essay of hers on the Alainu, one of the things she's thinking about is that a ritual like the Alainu can feel timeless. It can feel like it's sort of always been there. That's one of the. One of the ways in which religious rituals carry a certain kind of power. But as Farnath describes it, it comes from somewhere. It was invented, inaugurated, and also reinvented in. In various ways. So one of the things that she brings out is how through the repetition of this ritual at various points in history, the sort of meaning and resonance of it shifts. So she talks about innovations, for instance, among liberal jews in the 19th and 20th centuries through reformed Judaism, who were reflecting on the themes of Jewish chosenness. And so one of the things that Farnath brings out in a way that's really important for the collection as a whole is that ritual practices, in whatever context, have this kind of diachronic character. They exist in time, they are subject to repetition, which makes them available for reinvention. And that's one of the ways in which they retain currency. That's one of the ways in which they have such power is that they allow room for invention in this way.
- [54:26]
B
Great. So next we're going to go in a very different direction. This next chapter was very surprising to me, but super thought provoking. So Margot Kitz proposes a consideration of what she calls rituals of menace, specifically killing rituals, no less which are those that, quote, strive to precipitate intense responses typically of pain or humiliation. It witnesses, end quote. And so this will connect to, you know, those discourses about power as well that we were talking about before. Just a super different way to think about ritual entirely. And so to do this, she analyzes an ancient example, which is a Homeric oath ritual, which describes an animal sacrifice. So a literary text that just describes the killing ritual itself. And then she compares this, you know, to something contemporary. So to give long trajectory of development over time to the 2014 SoTLoff beheading video, which is an Islamic State threat video that was released on YouTube in order to explore the ways that these grisly spectacles take hold of witnesses attention, which is our theme for this section, Ritual and attention in order to force the witnesses to contemplate ideas like life, pain, fear, dying. The way that attention is grabbed and then you're held kind of captive by these rituals are really fascinating to me too. Yeah. And then the other chapter in this section has to do with the work of Harry Nankin, who does cameraless photography. So again, a lot here. Can you tell us a little bit more?
- [56:21]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think the main thing to tell our listeners is just that these examples that you've described really exemplify the range of this book. I mean, one of the reasons I think this is an exciting book is.
- [56:33]
B
That.
- [56:35]
A
A lot of books on art and religion focus on traditional media for European fine art, painting, sculpture, and they often focus on famous artists that people have spent a lot of time thinking about, you know, whatever. Vermeer, Rembrandt, Pollock, Picasso. But we, but because we built this collaborative structure where we had an interdisciplinary group of scholars meeting regularly with Melbourne based artists thinking in their studios about their practice. There's a real, there's a real range in, in, in the, the perspectives that are represented in the collection also with respect to the rituals that are represented. So when I was imagining this project with my co editor Lexi, I, I didn't think we would find ourselves with an essay on an Islamic State beheading. But, but here we are. Margo Kitz has written really interesting and illuminating things about, about ritual and its relationship to knowledge. She has an interest in violence and, and so she, she brings to light the, the sort of ritual dimension of violence which I think is important because religion in general and then religious ritual in particular is sometimes sanitized. Sometimes, you know, people like to focus on the, the nice bits of religion as something that sort of promotes peace. And you Know, calm understanding. But rituals can be used in all kinds of ways. And so kits. Kits brings. Brings that out. Harry Nankin as an artist is. Is really interesting, as you say. He. His main medium is cameraless photography, which is really, really creative. It produces results that are quite extraordinary, both in their visual impact, but also, though in the. In the creative process. And they again, like. Like some of our other artists, Harry's work is really intimately related to the. The country that he works on in Australia, around Melbourne, and then also the cultural traditions of Aboriginal people. So Harry had a really amazing project on the Bogon moth, which is a large moth that was an important food source for Aboriginal people for some time until I think it was changing environmental conditions meant that the moth population declined. But Harry accesses these traditions in ways that are really beautiful. And Jason Gorancy writes an essay as a sort of final piece in this cluster on attention, on the role of attention in Harry Nincken's practice and the way in which Harry's removal, you can call it subtraction, perhaps of the medium of the camera, of the sort of intermediary of the camera, the way in which that is a kind of emblem of direct attention to the world. And yeah, Jason reflects on the meanings that. That opens up in a way that I think is really suggestive.
- [60:11]
B
I love how we keep hearing, like you said, these themes keep coming up in each section. So even though you've grouped them around certain themes, those themes keep popping up again and again in the different chapters. So that's great. And our last theme is listening. Graham Ward uses two biblical scenes as examples of what he calls startling moments of disclosure, in particular when angels reveal themselves or God reveals himself to Moses as well as the Virgin Mary. To elaborate on the idea of being called to listen and engage in a liturgical communication, as he puts it. And then we have Enchi Weng. She connects this to what she calls deep listening in Mark Newbound's documentaries about artistic practice, with special attention to the meaning that can be found in silence. So I love the notion of deep listening. Please tell us more about ritual through the lens of listening.
- [61:15]
A
Yeah, so. And she brings a really useful perspective. She's trained as a sociologist, so she's another example of the way in which this collection brings together a really wide range of disciplinary perspectives. And one of the things that her essay brings out. So she's reflecting on the work of the artist whose reflection is included in this cluster. Mark Newbound is a video artist and his work has a really. A really attentive Quality. So it's suitable for this, for this conversation about listening, because he has a series of videos which I think you can find on Vimeo, really beautiful videos, including many of the artists that are included in this collection. Actually videos of an artist at work without commentary. They're not chatty. Usually he just uses the natural light in the artist's studio. So there's something really unforced, really hands off is the phrase that Mark uses in describing his practice that gives a kind of access to the materiality of the artist's work. So Enchi's reflecting on Mark's practice as a video artist and bringing out the way in which the. The way in which Mark works embodies a kind of attentive listening, which Enchi connects to different forms of scholarly methodology. So she contrasts a kind of. What's the phrase that she uses? She contrasts traditional, what she calls traditional research methods, which focus on quantitative, qualitative approaches to knowledge. And perhaps it has a kind of objectifying tendency that's sort of focused on the product. She contrasts that with a third approach which she calls performative research, which embodies, as she describes it, a kind of attentiveness that is oriented towards discovering new kinds of insight and knowledge through practice. So rather than seeing the practice as something that is sort of preparatory to the product, but but not actually essential, this style of research that Anshi describes sees the. The performance and the practice as actually being really central to what the research is. This is another theme that cuts across the collection, as our listeners can probably notice. But then she connects this emphasis on practice to indigenous forms of thinking. So in her understanding, indigenous knowledge production is also linked to an idea of the world that's interconnected, that involves this relationship between culture and ecology has a kind of spiritual dimension. It's not simply disembodied knowledge. And as her. In her experience as a. As a person of ethnic Chinese heritage living in Australia, she says that this indigenous form of knowledge resonates with her perception of the Yin Yang symbol in Chinese cosmology, which depicts interconnectedness and balance. And so. And she's sort of using Mark Newbound's video practice as a way to sort of unfold this perspective on research as a kind of performative practice led endeavor. And so Graham Ward's essay is picking up on some of those same themes in relation to biblical reflection on the encounter with God. So Ward discusses a range of biblical texts, discusses spiritual thinkers in the Christian tradition, like Master Eckhart, who reflects on silence and possibility. But Something that I think is quite useful for our collection is that in conversation with philosophers like Stanley Cavell, Ward links this set of themes as it's developed in Christian tradition with a sort of broader set of questions that I know a lot of people are interested in about spirituality and the sort of possibilities for spirituality in a world in which religion has come into question in some sense. And so, yeah, Ward, I think, is a really useful way of, useful place in this collection to think about that kind of possibilities for spirituality alongside and beyond explicitly religious traditions.
- [66:06]
B
So you wrote the conclusion to this book and the way you frame and summarize its inquiries actually brought me around to an expression that I had in the back of my mind the entire time I was reading, I have to admit, which was, and please forgive the oversimplification, but that term or that phrase, spiritual but not religious. So as I'm sure you know, but I want to make sure our listeners are familiar that this is perhaps a somewhat glib phrase to describe the portion of the population that feels that they engage with spirituality or metaphysicality, sometimes these kinds of interests, but they don't include affiliation with any kind of established, organized or traditional religion. So I'm wondering, could we say that artistic practice as ritual is a way of doing spiritual but not religious as art?
- [66:57]
A
Yeah, I think that's a great question and not glib at all. I mean, I think, as we've discussed before, a lot of my work is really focused on this question about spiritual significance in a secular age. My first monograph, Hope in a Secular Age, is trying to explore connections between religious and non religious conceptions of hope and how that can help us to think about what it means to face our vulnerability in a world that has the capacity to delight and amaze but also disappoint us and hurt us. I think we discussed my collection on the varieties of atheism, which is an attempt to describe the non religious spiritual experience, non religious experience, as something that's not simply about disbelieving in certain things. Often atheism is presented as something that's quite boring and flat and polemical. But this collection of varieties of atheism, it describes atheism as holistic tradition that engages every aspect of human life, moral, aesthetic, imagination. And I think thinking about atheism as one form of non religion in that broader context shows that it's, it's really vivid and compelling. It can't, can't be dismissed as, as a simple, a simple question of ideology and belief. And so in this collection, my contributions are Both in a way, trying to think about the experience of people who value spirituality. They sort of understand themselves as having a dimension in their life and experience that can't be reduced to, I guess, sort of everyday economic concerns, that there's something more that they, they value that they want to find some sort of contact with. But many people are also alienated from the traditions that get called religious. And so in my first chapter, the first chapter of the book and then in the conclusion that I wrote, I try to get at this experience into a couple different ways. So in my. In the first chapter, I show that terms like religion have a history. So the traditions that get called religious now, they weren't always called religious. Religion is a relatively new word that, at least in the form that we know it emerged in the early modern period, and it took shape in a way that was wrapped up in the emergence of the secular state as a new form of power. It was shaped by colonial encounter with non European people and the rituals that they engaged in. But the, the term can shift. So like, like the category of art, as I've already described in relation to aboriginal mark painting, concepts like art and religion have been reinvented, taken up in new ways, and, and they can be reimagined. So that's to suggest that I think people who understand themselves as being spiritual but are nervous about religion, and I think it's possible to think about religious traditions in a broader frame. So, you know, a lot of my work is on medieval Christian thought. And in that context, one of the things that I try to show is that the history of Christian thought often doesn't correspond to the stereotypes that people have about what religion is. And yeah, so the, the collection as a whole is designed to show that thinking about religious traditions, specific religious traditions, whether it's Vedic ritual, Christian, the Christian Eucharist, other, other rituals, it can help people find a language to understand, to understand practices that they really value. The conclusion that you've asked about is getting at the question from a different kind of, different kind of angle, which is. A lot of my work is on traditions of what you could call mystical theology, which, as we've discussed, this collection is about art and knowing. But the traditions that I work on see religion as involving a kind of unknowing, a disciplined practice that. Involves gaining a kind of critical distance from the, from what one already knows, from the assumptions that are familiar. And as I described, there are artists like Robert Rauschenberg as a modern artist, whose white paintings involve a similar kind of sort of Critical spirit creating a kind of open space in order for something new or extraordinary to happen. And I think that the thinking about spiritual experiences involving a kind of unknowing can help to clarify why people who aren't religious, why they find spiritual power in, in art. I think art, our world is shaped in lots of ways by social systems, economic systems that we feel caught within. Often we're not really fully aware of how they work, but we sort of, I think, feel ourselves to be managed by, by algorithms, by technologies and systems that are powerful and often invisible. And in that context, I think that creating a kind of critical space for something different to happen. Setting aside what's familiar, unknowing, some of the things that we're used to thinking, finding new grooves for our thinking and feeling to move within. I think that's a really powerful thing. I think it's a powerful thing for politics. As I think about the crisis of American democracy today, I think that, that this kind of unknowing is embodied in the important role of art and aesthetics in pro democracy protest movements that are, I think, really, really moving and amazing around the world, including in the United States today. And so, as a kind of concluding reflection, I tried to give voice to the thing, I think, that draws non religious people to art as a place where something different can happen, something that can reorient our sense of what's possible.
- [73:50]
B
Well, that's a really nice way of leading into my last question about the book. And that was that after working on this with all of these incredible scholars and artists and all of these just out of the box, interesting ideas, finally, how would you summarize or characterize the knowledge producing capacity of art as ritual?
- [74:12]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think that the collection suggests that art as a practice and ritual as an activity that's associated with religion, but is not exclusively religious. These practices give us a kind of insight into the world which is really profound. It can't be reduced to propositional claims. It's sometimes difficult even to bring to language. But I think that it's important to think about what knowledge understanding means in a broader frame. So I think these traditions that I've briefly sketched give us some tools to think about that, but also in the way that I've just described in my concluding essay. I am probably myself more interested in unknowing rather than knowledge. I mean, unknowing and knowledge are two sides of the same coin. So it's not as if they're in competition. But one of the things that I think is so powerful about art and ritual is that they. They free us from what's familiar in a certain sense, precisely because they have this material, embodied character. Even. Even when they are in certain respects regular and repetitious, there's a kind of space that opens up in that repetition and in the aesthetic experience that they embody and enable, which I think takes us out of the. Of the ordinary rhythm and run of our lives. It. It enables us to access something beyond what's. What's familiar, beyond the assumptions that we're used to thinking with. The book that I'm writing at the moment is on miracles as a way to think about the role of imagination in democratic politics. And I think that something like the miraculous can happen in the encounter with art, something that reorients one's understanding of what's possible through a surprising experience that one might not have foreseen, might not have even thought to be possible beforehand. And, yeah, I think in that experience of amazement and surprise, that miraculous encounter with extraordinary beauty, I think that there's a form of unknowing that is maybe the deepest form of understanding and knowledge.
- [76:51]
B
There was another scholar, and I can't think of who it is now, who used the term epistemic humility, which is maybe sort of similar to your idea of unknowing. But I love that I've taken up a lot of your time today, I recognize. I want to thank you so, so much, but in the few minutes we have left, I want to ask you more about your next project. You said something about miracles. Do you mean now spiritual, but not religious miracles?
- [77:21]
A
Yeah. So the. The book that I'm writing is trying to do two things. So the first thing is to. Is to broaden our imagination of what a miracle is. So one of the things that I show is that the meaning of the miraculous shifts in the early modern period. So people are often familiar with critics of the miraculous, like David Hume is maybe the most famous one who argues that it's irrational to believe that. That an event violating the laws of nature had occurred through supernatural intervention. And on this definition of the miraculous as something that violates the laws of nature, miracles seem like something unscientific. They're associated with religious supernaturalism, which often religion is understood as involving belief in supernatural powers of one kind or another. And that understanding of religion, that definition of the miraculous, doesn't seem to have a place in a world where modern science explains so much. But one of the things I show is that before the modern period, miracles meant something very different. Medieval Christians, for instance, did not have a conception of the laws of nature that would enable them to imagine the violation of the laws of nature. The concept of the supernatural is a relatively late invention. It seems to have been coined, I think, in the 13th century, if I remember correctly. But even then the miraculous was not defined in terms of the supernatural until much later. So this idea that there's a sort of two tier picture of the world, nature and supernature, which violates it, that's a sort of new preoccupation. And one of the things I want to do is to tap into this older understanding of the miraculous, which is more focused on material practice. It's often defined subjectively in terms of the experience of wondering and focused on the way in which the experience of wonder can reshape a life. So for many medieval thinkers, Gregory the Great wrote an influential compendium of miracles. The paradigmatic miracle was actually conversion. It was the potential of a human heart to change, to turn in a way that might have seemed impossible before. So there's nothing supernatural about that. There's no sort of supernatural pyrotechnics. But I think that tells us something about non religious experience as well. So I've been thinking a lot recently about the experience of love, the way in which if, if you love someone, often the love arrives in a way that's really unexpected. Sometimes you might not even be aware while it's happening until it hits you all at once. And there's, it's, you know, it's a profoundly embodied experience, changes the way everything feels, the experience of, of love. And love isn't a miracle in the modern sense. It's not, you know, it's the most natural thing in the world. It doesn't violate any laws of nature. But I think it's miraculous in this, in this older sense. Insofar as it can change your life, it can make everything feel different all of a sudden. It can make a person attuned in a new way to the beauty and wonder of the world. And my feeling is that by, by trying to dispel some of these stereotypes about religious supernaturalism, by showing that older forms of religion were trying to give language to a different kind of experience of, of wonder. I think that brings into focus a dimension of modern experience that can get missed in the stories that modern science tells about what it is to be human. And for me, this matters especially. I've mentioned a couple times, I've been thinking a lot about contemporary politics. I'm very involved in my faculty union. I'M the chair of government relations for our union branch. And I think that advocating for higher ed in the face of rising fascism is really urgent. And in the pro democracy movements that I'm a part of, I. I think that there's something like the miraculous that operates, that there are groups that come together, often sustained by experiences of surprise, an unexpected victory that might not have seemed possible beforehand. And these groups work for a world that is not yet come into being. It seems like a world, for instance, of racial and economic justice. It's difficult to imagine the United States achieving the kind of equality that that would be required for true democracy to really be embodied. But I think that democracy is a miracle worth hoping in. And I think that thinking about the. The power of the miraculous and these older traditions can help us to understand the importance of emotion and imagination in democratic political movements. So that's what's on my mind.
- [82:30]
B
Fantastic. I hope you bring that book to me in the future when you've got it published.
- [82:36]
A
I'd love to talk about it.
- [82:37]
B
Yeah, I love those ideas. So, yeah. So I want to thank you for being on the show today. Thank you so much for being my first interview. Now that I'm back. Your book is full of so many super interesting ideas that were very new to me. I really hope all the listeners run out and buy it and check it out as well because there's so much that we left undiscussed, so much for them to discover.
- [82:59]
A
So, yeah, can I, can I say, Carrie, I should have said this at the top, but people can buy it. I hope they do. They don't have to because it's an open access ebook, which means that anyone can access the complete contents of the collection. If you Google Art Making a Spiritual Practice, you. You'll find the link and they will be yours. So it's available to everybody.
- [83:23]
B
That is a really great point. I will see what I can do about. We usually use, I'm trying to remember what it's called, like bookstore or there's a link that we always use for the books, but we should include your open source link as well in the show notes in the blog post so that people can very easily just click and access that. So I'll look into that, but perfect. Okay, good, great. Well, yes, hopefully we'll see you again with your next book. Otherwise I will wish you a wonderful day and a merry Christmas as well. Happy holidays.
- [83:59]
A
Thank you, Carrie. Such a pleasure.
- [84:00]
B
All right, bye. I want to thank you for listening to New Books and Secularism, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. I'm Carrie Lynn Evans and you may or may not recognize me as the regular host on this channel from a few years ago. Life and the lack of a recording studio have kept me sadly away from these interviews for a little while, but I'm back and I'm tremendously happy to be so. So stay tuned for the great episodes that are coming up. Once again. I've been speaking with Professor David Neuheiser about his book Art Making is Spiritual Rituals of Embodied Understanding, released this year by Bloomsbury Academic Press. If you'd like to find out more about David, you can Visit his website, dnewhehser.net or follow him on Bluesky Neuheiser Bsky Social if you enjoyed this podcast, please write us a positive review in your podcast player. Post about us on social media or tell a friend. I'm also interested in hearing from you about your thoughts on this podcast and the material we cover. Tell me about it. You can find me on bluesky at Carrie Lynnland. That's Carrie L Y N N L A N D Bsky Social do you have a book you'd like covered on one of our shows? Contact us through our website newbooksnetwork.com Also, be sure to follow us on all the socials and in your favorite place for podcasts, where you'll see every time we post a new interview. In the meantime, I'll wish you an A la prochen from Quebec until my.
- [85:32]
A
Next conversation about new books, Sam.