Gestures: The Study of Religion as Practice

The Future of the Religious Past

by Michiel Leezenberg (Contributor), Anne-Marie Korte (Editor), Martin M. Van Bruinessen (Editor)

This concluding volume of the Future of the Religious Past series approaches contemporary religion through the lens of practice: the rituals, performances, devotions, and everyday acts through which humans do religion. In spite of predictions about the inevitability of secularism, religion in the twenty-first century remains stubbornly resilient, and Gestures: The Study of Religion as Practice offers a new vantage point from which to see the religious as a category shaped and reshaped by modernity and to encounter religion not as something bounded by doctrines and sacred texts but as lived experience.



Twenty-four globally based scholars look to practice to examine such diverse phenomena as human rights, memory, martyrdom, dress and fashion, colonial legacies, blasphemy, mass political action, and the future of secularism.

688 pages, Paperback

Published August 2, 2022

About the author

Michiel Leezenberg teaches in the Philosophy department and in the MA programme 'Islam in the Modern World' at the University of Amsterdam.