The Lived Religion approach to religious studies emerged in the late 1990s out of the field of American religious history. It has sometimes been proffered as a modality of religious studies that attenuates the field’s imperial and civilizational biases, and has inspired work widely beyond its original Christian American purview, in Asian, Africana, and Latinx contexts.
This panel opens a retrospective on lived religion. We come together from diverse subfields to ask: What does it mean, and has it meant, to designate “life” to religion? What sorts of work have been availed by this approach? What sorts of work have been occluded? In what ways has lived religion contributed to a cultural reorientation of religious studies? What has it meant for the study of religion in America? What has it meant for the study of religions elsewhere? And what is the relation of the center and periphery?