James S Bielo
Biographic Data
| ID | 80981 |
|---|---|
| NAME | James S Bielo |
| GIVEN NAMES | James S |
| FAMILY NAME | Bielo |
| SIGNATURE | BIELO J S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Miami University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6219-5884 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 45 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 170 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 45 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Religion and Science
How have anthropologists theorized the relationship between religion and science? This chapter presents two ways of addressing this question. First, I consider how anthropologists have sought to delimit the epistemological boundaries of “religion” and “science” as differentiating fields. Second, I explore how religion and science become entangled in particular ways, and what we gain from engaging these entanglements ethnographically. To illustrat…
Vitality and Vestige: Notes on Domestication
The essays in this special issue offer a revealing comparative analysis of how religion and home are dialectically formed. “Domestication” is the organizing concept, which attunes us to a series of interlaced processes: the ways in which sacred objects enter the home; how homes and objects mutually transform each other; the integration of objects into domestic ritual life; and the capacity of objects to link home life with broader socio-spiritual…
Secondhand Sacred: Christian Material Culture and Reseller Ethics
Interruption and Restoration: Memory Work in Secondhand Circulation
This article explores the relationship between memory work and secondhand economies in the United States. "Memory work" is about the practices and conditions that constitute the ongoing (yet always partial) processes of remembering and forgetting. The continuous acts of valuation that occur with secondhand objects spotlight the contingency of memory, and a capacity for erasure or reconfiguration that is inextricable from the paths of capitalist c…
Three questions (and a candle): A reply to The Secular Paradox
Museums as Ritual Sites: Civilizing Rituals Reconsidered
Vintage not Retro
In this chapter, James S. Bielo demonstrates how material Christianity operates in capitalist exchange. This chapter explores the marketing and sale of Christian material culture through the networked assemblage of estate sales, thrift stores, flea markets, antique booths, auction houses, eBay, and Instagram. The ethnographic focus is on resellers who scavenge secondhand venues in search of donated, discarded, and passed over items. The analysis …
EBay Method and the Study of Religion
In this conversation we make explicit a research practice that has operated as something of a phantom method in the study of religion: acquiring objects of study via eBay, the online market and glo
Re-Assembling Fairs: EBay, Circulation, and Value
How do religious actors enter, occupy, and shape public contexts? This is a generative question for the critical study of religion, and a thoroughly material question. The public lives of religions
Return to the City of Joseph: Modern Mormonism’s Contest for the Soul of Nauvoo
Book Review| January 01 2020 Return to the City of Joseph: Modern Mormonism’s Contest for the Soul of Nauvoo Scott C. Esplin. Return to the City of Joseph: Modern Mormonism’s Contest for the Soul of Nauvoo. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. James S. Bielo James S. Bielo Reviewed by James S. Bielo is assistant professor of anthropology at Miami University (Oxford, Ohio). He is the author of four books, most recently Ark Encounter: The Ma…
The Social Life of Scriptures: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on Biblicism
What do Christians do with the Bible? How do theyùindividually and collectivelyùinteract with the sacred texts? Why does this engagement shift so drastically among and between social, historical, religious, and institutional contexts? Such questions are addressed in a most enlightening, engaging, and original way in The Social Life of Scriptures. Contributors offer a collection of closely analyzed and carefully conducted ethnographic and historic…
Experiential design and religious publicity at D.C.’s Museum of the Bible
This article examines the sensory dimension of religious publicity, focused on the case of an evangelical museum in the United States. Washington D.C.'s Museum of the Bible (MOTB) was envisioned and funded primarily by conservative Protestants, and is a revealing case of religion in public life because most of the creative labor of design was conceived and executed by secular firms who do not typically work for faith-based clients. The profession…
Incorporating Space: Protestant Fundamentalism and Astronomical Authorization
The problem of authority is vital for understanding the development of Protestant creationism. Two discursive fields have figured centrally in this religious movement's claims to authoritative knowledge: The Bible and science. The former has been remarkably stable over a century with a continuing emphasis on inerrancy and literalism, while the latter has been more mutable. Creationism's rejection of scientific evolution has endured, but its orien…
Where Prayers May Be Whispered: Promises of Presence in Protestant Place-Making
This article examines themes of religion tourism, presence, devotional labour, and place-making from the vantage point of a 'forgotten' Christian attraction in the United States. I integrate archival, oral history, and ethnographic data to analyze the accumulations throughout the 60-year life course of the Garden of Hope, a site in northern Kentucky (USA): from distinctly Protestant and distinctly Catholic material features, more ambiguous theolo…
“Particles‐to‐People…Molecules‐to‐Man”: Creationist Poetics in Public Debates
This article examines religious language in a contested public sphere by analyzing performances of linguistic creativity among creationists in the United States. The public creation‐evolution debate has been a central speech event in the development of modern creationism, and functions as a key site for claiming cultural legitimacy. Focusing on three creation‐evolution debates spanning 33 years, I advance the concept of “creationist poetics” to c…
Imagining Catholicism and Catholics: Critical Reflections on The Anthropology of Catholicism
Quality: D.C.’s Museum of the Bible and Aesthetic Evaluation
"Quality: D.C.’s Museum of the Bible and Aesthetic Evaluation." Material Religion, 15(1), pp. 131–132
Providence and Publicity in Waiting for a Creationist Theme Park
Sacred Scriptures
For the anthropology of religion, the historical and ethnographic study of sacred scriptures is a robust field of inquiry. The approach emphasized here focuses on the social life of scriptures; that is, how communities of practice use scriptures strategically to accomplish important cultural work. This entry outlines a theoretical grounding for this approach, reviews a sampling of major research findings and promising research directions, and pre…
Immersion as shared imperative: Entertainment of/in Digital Scholarship
The modern culture of entertainment is performed across diverse practices and institutions – from Disney to gaming, Hollywood to tourism, museums to commercial consumption – and it prizes being physically and affectively ‘caught up’ in forms of play that transport participants away from everyday reality. Defined in immersive terms, entertainment is pervasive and ideologically compelling. This article explores an analogous relationship between thi…
Digital scholarship and the critical study of religion - four case studies
The organizing question for this thematic forum is this: how might projects of digital scholarship advance the critical, comparative study of religion? The time is certainly ripe for such a questio
Anthropology, theology, critique
This article reflects on one potential relationship the anthropological study of religion might enjoy with a critical orientation to religion. To do so, I highlight a burgeoning (but tenuous) dialog between anthropology and theology. Ultimately, I propose that a focus on religion and human flourishing provides one wavelength on which an anthropology-theology collaboration can thrive. I follow the observation that anthropologists and theologians a…
Biblical Gardens and the Sensuality of Religious Pedagogy
This article explores how the phenomenon of biblical gardens joins three bodies of scholarship: the social life of scriptures, the study of religion’s media turn, and religious pedagogy. As a kind of religious attraction, the biblical garden is both devotional and pedagogical, with historic roots in nineteenth-century projects to connect botanical science with biblical literacy. I argue that the pedagogy of biblical gardens is anchored by an ideo…
Flower, soil, water, stone: Biblical landscape items and Protestant materiality
Protestants mobilize objects such as 'Holy Land' flowers, Jordan River stones, vials of Dead Sea water, sand from Lake Tiberias, and Golgotha soil as potent metonymic resources, promising a kind of direct access to the scriptural past and its sacred stories. This article uses this case of biblical landscape items to reflect on the historic ambivalence that characterizes Protestant relations with religious materiality. Building on scholarship that…
The Question of Cultural Change in the Social Scientific Study of Religion: Notes from the Emerging Church
This article explores how anthropological models of cultural change bolster the social scientific study of the Emerging Church movement. A distinction is drawn between market-oriented approaches to change that measure institutional growth and decline and cultural-oriented approaches that address broader effects on sociocultural systems. Emphasis is placed on models that emphasize change occurring internal to cultural systems and that recognize th…
The Mind of Christ: Financial Success, Born-again Personhood, and the Anthropology of Christianity
In this article, I contribute to the emerging project of the anthropology of Christianity by exploring the subject of born-again personhood. As a nascent field of inquiry, the anthropology of Christianity must delimit what theoretical opportunities exist for comparative research. I argue that a focus on personhood offers a promising series of questions toward this end. To illustrate this claim, I use the case study of one Evangelical Sunday schoo…
Replication as Religious Practice, Temporality as Religious Problem
This article explores how religious communities actualize the virtual problem of temporality. Analysing two case studies from contemporary America, Mormon Trek re-enactment and a creationist theme park re-creating Noah's ark, I argue that replication is a strategy for constructing a relationship with time in which a strict past–present divide is collapsed through affective means. This work contributes to comparative studies in the anthropology of…
City of Man, City of God: The Re-Urbanization of American Evangelicals
In post-World War II America, U.S. Evangelicalism became a religion deeply entrenched with suburbanization and commercial sprawl. This article examines the growing phenomenon of middle-class white Evangelicals who are returning to the city. Since September 2008 I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork with nearly 100 Evangelicals in the post-industrial, Rust Belt cities of Cincinnati, Hamilton, and Middletown. I argue first that Evangelical re-urb…
On the failure of ‘meaning’: Bible reading in the anthropology of Christianity
In this article I contribute to research in the anthropology of Christianity by exploring the practice of group Bible reading. I focus on the analytical category of ‘meaning’ and what happens when readers continually fail to produce defined, resolved readings of particular Biblical texts. To investigate these issues I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with a Missouri-Synod Lutheran men's group in the Midwestern United States, and their 12-week study…
Urban Christianities: Place-Making in Late Modernity
What do the words ‘urban Christianity’ conjure for you? Perhaps a fiery street-corner preacher exhorting passers-by to repent, voice near a scream, funereal Bible fixed in a white-knuckled clinch
How Much of this is Promise: God as Sincere Speaker in Evangelical Bible Reading
In this article I examine how language ideology intersects with textual ideology, listening, and group identity in an American Evangelical context. The ethnographic focus is a men's Bible study group, their extended reading of the Old Testament book of Proverbs, a schism within the group involving a Pentecostal participant, and the tensions that surface when they read biblical texts as promises from God. I argue that the model of the sincere spea…
The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion
Bryan Turner's new Companion to the Sociology of Religion is a wide-ranging work of comparative sociology that explores the significant new sociological forces at work in the work that are both shaping and are shaped by religious groups and their beliefs and practices. As Turner notes in his opening essay, to examine the topics covered in this volume, globalization, resacralization, religious violence, and postmodernity, is to recognize "just how…
Act Like Men: Social Engagement and Evangelical Masculinity
This article contributes to ongoing public and scholarly debates about evangelical social engagement in the United States. I illustrate that, for some conservative evangelical men, activism is fused to the cultural construction of masculinity. My central argument is that, despite becoming invested in ‘new’ acts of social engagement, these conservative evangelicals continue to rely on a familiar cultural script that uses individualist logics, rath…
Anthropology, theology, critique
This article reflects on one potential relationship the anthropological study of religion might enjoy with a critical orientation to religion. To do so, I highlight a burgeoning (but tenuous) dialog between anthropology and theology. Ultimately, I propose that a focus on religion and human flourishing provides one wavelength on which an anthropology-theology collaboration can thrive. I follow the observation that anthropologists and theologians a…
The ‘Emerging Church’ in America: Notes on the interaction of Christianities
The 'Emerging Church' is an American-born movement that dates to the late 1990s. It is fundamentally a movement of cultural critique in which the primary interlocutor is the dominant tradition in the United States, conservative Evangelicalism. In this article I address the phenomenon of Emerging Christianity based on historical, literary, and ethnographic analyses of Emerging Church advocates and critics. In particular, I argue that four points o…
Walking in the Spirit of Blood: Moral Identity among Born-Again Christians
The proliferation of small groups within American Protestantism, in particular those devoted to Bible study, raises questions about the collective construction of meaning in congregational life. Using discourse as an analytical tool, this article explores the meaning of moral identity as constructed in three Protestant groups in the southern United States. Discursive participants relied on three strategies for building a concept of the moral self…
Where Prayers May Be Whispered: Promises of Presence in Protestant Place-Making
This article examines themes of religion tourism, presence, devotional labour, and place-making from the vantage point of a 'forgotten' Christian attraction in the United States. I integrate archival, oral history, and ethnographic data to analyze the accumulations throughout the 60-year life course of the Garden of Hope, a site in northern Kentucky (USA): from distinctly Protestant and distinctly Catholic material features, more ambiguous theolo…
Biblical Gardens and the Sensuality of Religious Pedagogy
This article explores how the phenomenon of biblical gardens joins three bodies of scholarship: the social life of scriptures, the study of religion’s media turn, and religious pedagogy. As a kind of religious attraction, the biblical garden is both devotional and pedagogical, with historic roots in nineteenth-century projects to connect botanical science with biblical literacy. I argue that the pedagogy of biblical gardens is anchored by an ideo…
Purity, danger, and redemption: Notes on urban missional evangelicals
In this article, I examine how urban missional evangelicals in the United States cultivate a sense of place. Being "missional" refers to the desire to be a missionary in one's own society, an idea that has spread widely through the Emerging Church movement. Proceeding from an ethnographic analysis of two urban pastors, I argue that being an urban missional evangelical means having an intricate, nuanced, but ultimately mediate sense of place. Grou…
Flower, soil, water, stone: Biblical landscape items and Protestant materiality
Protestants mobilize objects such as 'Holy Land' flowers, Jordan River stones, vials of Dead Sea water, sand from Lake Tiberias, and Golgotha soil as potent metonymic resources, promising a kind of direct access to the scriptural past and its sacred stories. This article uses this case of biblical landscape items to reflect on the historic ambivalence that characterizes Protestant relations with religious materiality. Building on scholarship that…
Faith in Anthropology: A Symposium on Timothy Larsen’s The Slain God
Promises of Place: A Future of Comparative U.S . Ethnography
Immersion as shared imperative: Entertainment of/in Digital Scholarship
The modern culture of entertainment is performed across diverse practices and institutions – from Disney to gaming, Hollywood to tourism, museums to commercial consumption – and it prizes being physically and affectively ‘caught up’ in forms of play that transport participants away from everyday reality. Defined in immersive terms, entertainment is pervasive and ideologically compelling. This article explores an analogous relationship between thi…
Cultivating Intimacy: Interactive Frames for Evangelical Bible Study
In this article I contribute to the sociology and anthropology of American Evangelicalism by examining the discourse of group Bible study. Every week millions of Christians in the U.S. meet for group study, and in doing so, actively negotiate the categories of meaning central to their faith. Yet, this crucial practice has received scant attention from scholars. This study is grounded in theories of social practice and symbolic interaction, where …
Incorporating Space: Protestant Fundamentalism and Astronomical Authorization
The problem of authority is vital for understanding the development of Protestant creationism. Two discursive fields have figured centrally in this religious movement's claims to authoritative knowledge: The Bible and science. The former has been remarkably stable over a century with a continuing emphasis on inerrancy and literalism, while the latter has been more mutable. Creationism's rejection of scientific evolution has endured, but its orien…
Imagining Catholicism and Catholics: Critical Reflections on The Anthropology of Catholicism
Digital scholarship and the critical study of religion - four case studies
The organizing question for this thematic forum is this: how might projects of digital scholarship advance the critical, comparative study of religion? The time is certainly ripe for such a questio
The Question of Cultural Change in the Social Scientific Study of Religion: Notes from the Emerging Church
This article explores how anthropological models of cultural change bolster the social scientific study of the Emerging Church movement. A distinction is drawn between market-oriented approaches to change that measure institutional growth and decline and cultural-oriented approaches that address broader effects on sociocultural systems. Emphasis is placed on models that emphasize change occurring internal to cultural systems and that recognize th…
Walking in the Spirit of Blood: Moral Identity among Born-Again Christians
The proliferation of small groups within American Protestantism, in particular those devoted to Bible study, raises questions about the collective construction of meaning in congregational life. Using discourse as an analytical tool, this article explores the meaning of moral identity as constructed in three Protestant groups in the southern United States. Discursive participants relied on three strategies for building a concept of the moral self…
The Mind of Christ: Financial Success, Born-again Personhood, and the Anthropology of Christianity
In this article, I contribute to the emerging project of the anthropology of Christianity by exploring the subject of born-again personhood. As a nascent field of inquiry, the anthropology of Christianity must delimit what theoretical opportunities exist for comparative research. I argue that a focus on personhood offers a promising series of questions toward this end. To illustrate this claim, I use the case study of one Evangelical Sunday schoo…
On the failure of ‘meaning’: Bible reading in the anthropology of Christianity
In this article I contribute to research in the anthropology of Christianity by exploring the practice of group Bible reading. I focus on the analytical category of ‘meaning’ and what happens when readers continually fail to produce defined, resolved readings of particular Biblical texts. To investigate these issues I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with a Missouri-Synod Lutheran men's group in the Midwestern United States, and their 12-week study…
Cultivating Intimacy: Interactive Frames for Evangelical Bible Study
In this article I contribute to the sociology and anthropology of American Evangelicalism by examining the discourse of group Bible study. Every week millions of Christians in the U.S. meet for group study, and in doing so, actively negotiate the categories of meaning central to their faith. Yet, this crucial practice has received scant attention from scholars. This study is grounded in theories of social practice and symbolic interaction, where …
The ‘Emerging Church’ in America: Notes on the interaction of Christianities
The 'Emerging Church' is an American-born movement that dates to the late 1990s. It is fundamentally a movement of cultural critique in which the primary interlocutor is the dominant tradition in the United States, conservative Evangelicalism. In this article I address the phenomenon of Emerging Christianity based on historical, literary, and ethnographic analyses of Emerging Church advocates and critics. In particular, I argue that four points o…
Book and Film Reviews
BENTLEY, Alex (ed.), The Edge of Reason? Science and Religion in Modern Society, 222 pp., foreword. London: Continuum, 2008. Paperback, £13.99. ISBN: 9781847062185. BERGER, Peter, Grace DAVIE, and Effi e FOKAS, Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations, 176 pp., bibliography, index. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Paperback, £16.99. ISBN: 978075466011. LEVEY, Geoffrey Brahm and Tariq MODOOD (eds.), Secularism, Religion and Multicultural…
Purity, danger, and redemption: Notes on urban missional evangelicals
In this article, I examine how urban missional evangelicals in the United States cultivate a sense of place. Being "missional" refers to the desire to be a missionary in one's own society, an idea that has spread widely through the Emerging Church movement. Proceeding from an ethnographic analysis of two urban pastors, I argue that being an urban missional evangelical means having an intricate, nuanced, but ultimately mediate sense of place. Grou…
How Much of this is Promise: God as Sincere Speaker in Evangelical Bible Reading
In this article I examine how language ideology intersects with textual ideology, listening, and group identity in an American Evangelical context. The ethnographic focus is a men's Bible study group, their extended reading of the Old Testament book of Proverbs, a schism within the group involving a Pentecostal participant, and the tensions that surface when they read biblical texts as promises from God. I argue that the model of the sincere spea…
City of Man, City of God: The Re-Urbanization of American Evangelicals
In post-World War II America, U.S. Evangelicalism became a religion deeply entrenched with suburbanization and commercial sprawl. This article examines the growing phenomenon of middle-class white Evangelicals who are returning to the city. Since September 2008 I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork with nearly 100 Evangelicals in the post-industrial, Rust Belt cities of Cincinnati, Hamilton, and Middletown. I argue first that Evangelical re-urb…
The New Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Religion
Bryan Turner's new Companion to the Sociology of Religion is a wide-ranging work of comparative sociology that explores the significant new sociological forces at work in the work that are both shaping and are shaped by religious groups and their beliefs and practices. As Turner notes in his opening essay, to examine the topics covered in this volume, globalization, resacralization, religious violence, and postmodernity, is to recognize "just how…
Belief, Deconversion, and Authenticity among U.S. Emerging Evangelicals
In this article I examine the status of belief among U.S. evangelicals organizing under the moniker of the “emerging church.” As part of their cultural critique of the conservative Christian subculture, many emerging evangelicals recast their standpoint toward the role of propositional doctrine in their definition of an authentic Christian self. I join with colleagues in the anthropology of religion, in particular the anthropology of Christianity…
Teaching: Religion Matters
Promises of Place: A Future of Comparative U.S . Ethnography
Urban Christianities: Place-Making in Late Modernity
What do the words ‘urban Christianity’ conjure for you? Perhaps a fiery street-corner preacher exhorting passers-by to repent, voice near a scream, funereal Bible fixed in a white-knuckled clinch
Act Like Men: Social Engagement and Evangelical Masculinity
This article contributes to ongoing public and scholarly debates about evangelical social engagement in the United States. I illustrate that, for some conservative evangelical men, activism is fused to the cultural construction of masculinity. My central argument is that, despite becoming invested in ‘new’ acts of social engagement, these conservative evangelicals continue to rely on a familiar cultural script that uses individualist logics, rath…
Anthropology of Religion: The Basics
Anthropology of Religion: The Basics is an accessible and engaging introductory text organized around key issues that all anthropologists of religion face. This book uses a wide range of historical and ethnographic examples to address not only what is studied by anthropologists of religion, but how such studies are approached. It addresses questions such as: How do human agents interact with gods and spirits? What is the nature of doing religious…
Secular studies come of age
In this essay I review three important volumes for the field of secular studies: Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, Rethinking Secularism, and The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere. All three volumes explore the nature of the secular and the status, role, and possible futures of religion in our late modern, globalized world. The volumes present 34 essays by 30 authors representing seven disciplines, and at least six end games. For som…
Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity
The Emerging Church movement developed in the mid-1990s among primarily white, urban, middle-class pastors and laity who were disenchanted with America's conservative Evangelical sub-culture. It is a response to the increasing divide between conservative Evangelicals and concerned critics who strongly oppose what they consider overly slick, corporate, and consumerist versions of faith. A core feature of their response is a challenge to traditiona…
Faith in Anthropology: A Symposium on Timothy Larsen’s The Slain God
The Question of Cultural Change in the Social Scientific Study of Religion: Notes from the Emerging Church
This article explores how anthropological models of cultural change bolster the social scientific study of the Emerging Church movement. A distinction is drawn between market-oriented approaches to change that measure institutional growth and decline and cultural-oriented approaches that address broader effects on sociocultural systems. Emphasis is placed on models that emphasize change occurring internal to cultural systems and that recognize th…
Replication as Religious Practice, Temporality as Religious Problem
This article explores how religious communities actualize the virtual problem of temporality. Analysing two case studies from contemporary America, Mormon Trek re-enactment and a creationist theme park re-creating Noah's ark, I argue that replication is a strategy for constructing a relationship with time in which a strict past–present divide is collapsed through affective means. This work contributes to comparative studies in the anthropology of…
Providence and Publicity in Waiting for a Creationist Theme Park
Sacred Scriptures
For the anthropology of religion, the historical and ethnographic study of sacred scriptures is a robust field of inquiry. The approach emphasized here focuses on the social life of scriptures; that is, how communities of practice use scriptures strategically to accomplish important cultural work. This entry outlines a theoretical grounding for this approach, reviews a sampling of major research findings and promising research directions, and pre…
Immersion as shared imperative: Entertainment of/in Digital Scholarship
The modern culture of entertainment is performed across diverse practices and institutions – from Disney to gaming, Hollywood to tourism, museums to commercial consumption – and it prizes being physically and affectively ‘caught up’ in forms of play that transport participants away from everyday reality. Defined in immersive terms, entertainment is pervasive and ideologically compelling. This article explores an analogous relationship between thi…
Digital scholarship and the critical study of religion - four case studies
The organizing question for this thematic forum is this: how might projects of digital scholarship advance the critical, comparative study of religion? The time is certainly ripe for such a questio
Sociology (32 works) · Philosophy (26 works) · Religion and Society Interactions (21 works) · Epistemology (19 works) · Religious Tourism and Spaces (19 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (17 works) · Anthropology (17 works) · Art (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · Law (14 works)