Hula Hoop Spiritualities: Social Media, Embodied Experience, and Communities of Practice

Hula Hoop Spiritualities: Social Media, Embodied Experience, and Communities of Practice

Jenna Gray-Hildenbrand and Martha Smith Roberts investigate how the hula hoop has become both an empowering tool for embodied practical spirituality rooted in metaphysical religiosity and a basis for a thriving community connected not by a shared dogma but by a common practice. They argue that the growth of the hooping subculture lies in its ability to nurture the diverse spiritual experiences of individual hoopers and to build an inclusive...

Uncanny Images and the Literalism of Modernity

Uncanny Images and the Literalism of Modernity

Ali Qadir and Tatiana Tiaynen-Qadir offer an initial description of the widespread presence of uncanny images in religious practice in South Asian Islam and Russian Orthodox Christianity. Drawing on their multi-sited fieldwork, the authors map the presence of two religious images in each tradition that are familiar yet eerie, and that signal a rupture from the ‘normal’ order of things. Their analysis proposes that uncanny images make a phenomenological demand...