Religion and the Senses

In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of scholarship on religion and the senses (seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, etc.) that deals with how patterns of religious experience, senses and material objects affect each other mutually. Some scholars have examined how places, buildings, objects, bodies, supernatural beings and forces charged with religious meaning can influence sensory experiences, or the ways in which senses root religious experience in the physiological realm. Others have investigated how humans imbue the senses with religious import by assigning them symbolic significance. For that very reason, the academic year 2015-2016 was dedicated to the overarching topic religion and the senses. Part of the KHK's endeavor was to understand the processes of attributing religious meaning to the senses.