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.

Michiel Leezenberg teaches in the Departments of Philosophy, Religious Studies, and Classics at the University of Amsterdam and has published widely on the philosophy of the humanities, Islamic intellectual history, and the Kurdish question. His recent publications include (with Gerard de Vries) History and Philosophy of the Humanities: An Introduction (Amsterdam University Press, 2018), Sexuality and Politics in Islam (Prometheus, 2017), and Foucault (Athenaum, 2021).

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Anne-Marie Korte is professor of religion and gender at Utrecht University. She coedited (with Angela Berlis and Kune Biezeveld) Everyday Life and the Sacred: Re/configuring Gender Studies in Religion (Brill, 2017); (with Christiane Kruse and Birgit Meyer) Taking Offense: Religion, Art, and Visual Culture in Plural Configurations (Fink Verlag, 2018); and (with Mariecke van den Berg, Lieke Schrijvers, and Jelle Wiering) Transforming Bodies: Religions, Powers and Agencies in Europe (New York: Routledge, 2020).

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Martin van Bruinessen is professor emeritus in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University. He is the editor of Contemporary Developments in Indonesian Islam: Explaining the ‘Conservative Turn’ (Institute of South East Asian Studies, 2013) and (with Stefano Allievi) of Producing Islamic Knowledge: Transmission and Dissemination in Western Europe (Routledge, 2011).

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Umut Azak is associate professor in the Department of International Relations at Istanbul Okan University. Her research focuses on the history of secularism and memory politics in Turkey. She is the author of Islam and Secularism in Turkey: Kemalism, Religion and the Nation State (I. B. Tauris, 2010).

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Christoph Baumgartner is associate professor of ethics in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University. His recent work includes “Liberal Political Philosophy of Religious Difference after Saba Mahmood,” Sociology of Islam 7, no. 4 (2019).

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Rajeev Bhargava is director of the Parekh Institute of Indian Thought at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in New Delhi, where he has worked since 2005. His writings include What Is Political Theory and Why Do We Need It? (Oxford University Press, 2012) and The Promise of India’s Secular Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2010).

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John R. Bowen is Dunbar-Van Cleve Professor at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author of the collaborative work Pragmatic Inquiry (Routledge, 2021) and of On British Islam (Princeton University Press, 2016) and is currently writing a five-country study of Proving Halal.

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Judith Butler is Maxine Elliot Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and the Program of Critical Theory at the University of California, Berkeley. Her most recent works include Senses of the Subject and Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly (Harvard University Press, 2015) and The Force of Nonviolence (Verso, 2021).

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Rokus de Groot is professor emeritus of Musicology at the University of Amsterdam and a composer. His work includes “From Past to Present and from Listening to Hearing: Final Indefinable Moments in Bach’s and Stravinsky’s Music,” in On Religion and Memory, ed. Babette Hellemans et al. (Fordham University Press, 2013) and, as composer, “For Dhruba” (2017), an homage to the sarangi maestro Pandit Dhruba Ghosh.

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Martijn de Koning is an anthropologist affiliated with the Department of Islamic Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen. He is the co-author (with Carmen Becker and Ineke Roex) of Islamic Militant Activism in Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany: “Islands in a Sea of Disbelief”’ (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). With Nadia Fadil and Francesco Ragazzi, he edited the volume Radicalization in Belgium and the Netherlands Critical Perspectives on Violence and Security (IB Tauris, 2019). He maintains his own blog: http://religionresearch.org/closer.

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Sanne Derks is a freelance documentary photographer and anthropologist (PhD) from Arnhem, the Netherlands. Her work focuses on social and environmental issues in Latin America and is published, among others, in the New York Times, the Guardian, and El País.

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Wendy Doniger is the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of History of Religions at the University of Chicago. She is the author of The Hindus: An Alternative History (Penguin Press, 2009) and the translator, with Sudhir Kakar, of Vatsyayana’s Kamasutra (Oxford University Press, 2003).

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Willy Jansen is professor emerita of gender studies at Radboud University Nijmegen. She has published on religious women’s groups in Algeria, missions in the Middle East, and gender and ritual in Spain. She is the coeditor (with Catrien Notermans) of Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World (Routledge, 2009) and Gender, Nation, and Religion in European Pilgrimage (Routledge, 2012).

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Yolande Jansen is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and professor of humanism in relation to religion and secularity at the VU University Amsterdam, appointed by the Socrates Foundation. She is the author of Secularism, Assimilation, and the Crisis of Multiculturalism: French Modernist Legacies (Amsterdam University Press, 2014).

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Mariwan Kanie is a lecturer at the Department of Arabic Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He specializes in the political and intellectual history of the modern Middle East and the Kurdish question and is the author of Ethics and Resistance: Introduction to Foucault’s Thought (in Kurdish) (Andesha Publication, 2017).

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Webb Keane is the George Herbert Mead Collegiate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan and the author of Ethical Life: Its Natural and Social Histories (Princeton University Press, 2016) and Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (University of California Press, 2007).

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Michael Lambek holds a Canada Research Chair in Anthropology of Ethical Life at the University of Toronto and is the author of Ordinary Ethics: Anthropology, Language, and Action (Fordham University Press, 2010) and The Ethical Condition: Essays on Action, Person, and Value (University of Chicago Press, 2015).

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Bruno Latour, a philosopher and anthropologist, is the author of We Have Never Been Modern, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, Facing Gaia, Down to Earth, and many other books. He coedited (with Peter Weibel) the previous ZKM volumes Making Things Public, ICONOCLASH, and Reset Modernity! (all published by the MIT Press).

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Annelies Moors is professor emerita of contemporary Muslim societies at the Department of Anthropology of the University of Amsterdam. She coedited (with Emma Tarlo) Islamic Fashion and Anti-fashion: New Perspectives from Europe and North-America (Bloomsbury, 2013).

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Catrien Notermans is an anthropologist and associate professor in the Department of Cultural Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University, Nijmegen, The Netherlands. She is coeditor (with Willy Jansen) of Moved by Mary: The Power of Pilgrimage in the Modern World (Routledge, 2009) and Gender, Nation and Religion in European Pilgrimage (Routledge, 2012).

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S. Brent Plate is professor of religious studies at Hamilton College (Clinton, USA) and author of Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of the World (Columbia University Press, 2017) and A History of Religion in 5½ Objects (Beacon Press, 2014).

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Samuli Schielke is a senior researcher at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin and associate primary investigator at the Berlin Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Societies. He is author of The Perils of Joy: Contesting Mulid Festivals in Contemporary Egypt (Syracuse University Press, 2012), Egypt in the Future Tense (Indiana University Press, 2015), and Migrant Dreams: Egyptian Workers in the Gulf States (American University in Cairo Press, 2020).

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Regina M. Schwartz is professor of English and religion at Northwestern University and author of Loving Justice, Living Shakespeare (Oxford University Press, 2017) and Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Stanford University Press, 2008)

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Yvonne Sherwood has taught literature and religious studies at several British universities, most recently at the School of European Culture and Languages of the University of Kent. She is the coauthor (with Stephen D. Moore) of The Invention of the Biblical Scholar: A Critical Manifesto (Fortress Press, 2011) and author of Biblical Blaspheming: Trials of the Sacred for a Secular Age (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Blasphemy: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2021).

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Thomas A. Tweed is the Harold and Martha Welch Professor of American Studies and professor of history at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of Crossing and Dwelling: A Theory of Religion (Harvard University Press, 2006) and Religion: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2020).

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Sander van Maas teaches philosophy and music at Utrecht University College, the University of Amsterdam, and the Conservatorium van Amsterdam. His publications include The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen’s Breakthrough Toward the Beyond (Fordham University Press, 2012), Thresholds of Listening: Sound, Technics, Space (Fordham University Press, 2015), and Contemporary Music and Spirituality (Routledge, 2016).

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Ali Hassan Zaidi is an associate professor in the Department of Global Studies and cross-appointed to the Department of Religion and Culture at Wilfrid Laurier University (Waterloo, Canada). He is the author of Islam, Modernity and the Human Sciences (2011) and has published in various journals, including most recently the Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies.

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