Publications

Indigenous Churces: Anthropology of Christianity in Lowland South America

Editors: Élise Capredon, César Ceriani Cernadas, Minna Opas This book raises the question of what an Indigenous church is and how its members define their ties of affiliation or separation. Establishing a pioneering dialogue between Amazonian and Gran Chaco studies on Indigenous Christianity, the contributions address historical processes, cosmological conceptions, ritual practices, leadership dynamics, and […]

Christianity and the Limits of Materiality

Editor(s): Minna Opas, Anna Haapalainen Despite the fact that Christianity is understood to be thoroughly intertwined with matter, objects, and things, Christians struggle to cope with this materiality in their daily lives. This volume argues that the ambivalent relationships many Christians have with materiality is a driving force that contributes to the way people in […]

Temenos Special Issue – Connected with God: Body, the social, and the transcendent

Opas, Minna & Anna Haapalainen (eds) 2016 Connected with God: Body, the social, and the transcendent. Temenos – Special Issue, Vol 52 No 2. The special issue Connected with God: Body, the Social, and the Transcendent addresses the very topical question of the architecture of religious, especially Christian, experiences. Specifically, it examines the processes in […]

Thomas Aquinas’s Relics as Focus for Conflict and Cult in the Late Middle Ages: The Restless Corpse

Marika Räsänen This book offers a new way of looking at Saint Thomas Aquinas-not as a living man, but as a posthumous source of relics. Marika Räsänen delves deep into the strange relationship between Aquinas’s physical remains and the devotional moments they enabled-in many cases in situations where the actual relics were not present, […]

Relics, Identity, and Memory in Medieval Europe

M. Räsänen, G. Hartmann, E. J. Richards (eds.) Relics, Identity, and Memory in Medieval Europe explores the vital role of relics in the Middle Ages in creating community, identity, and memory. This volume contributes to current discussions of the place of relics in devotional life, politics, and identity-formation, by illustrating both the power which relics […]