Forms of religious life
We draw inspiration from the classic Durkheimian idea that religious life is its own form—a form that lives in great intimacy with the social. Exploring the relations between the forms of religious life and the forms of social life is an important aspect of our research at the department. Contemporary empirical interfaces show that religious life and the boundaries of its self-enclosed normativity have given way to multiple different expressions and experiences of the social. The fact of the social inheres as individuals creatively activate, embody, and negotiate forms of life contained in various religious traditions through rituals, discourses, and practices. Inflected by the forces of the modern, secular and the post-modern, we locate how this social is recalibrated into the present within the select domains of hierarchy, inequality, caste, theology, cosmology, mind, body, spirituality, health, death, funeral, and grief.