Bringing the Sacred Down to Earth celebrates the merits of carefully contextualized comparison as an illuminating approach to the study of religion. Drawing from ethnographical work in several sites over a period of sixteen years, Dempsey juxtaposes Hindu and Christian, Indian and Euroamerican religious expressions that take shape as folklore figures, democratizing theologies, sanctified terrain, and extraordinary human abilities. She uncovers how these expressions, all of which lend sacred meaning and power to the material realities of religious participants, push against syst ... More

Bringing the Sacred Down to Earth celebrates the merits of carefully contextualized comparison as an illuminating approach to the study of religion. Drawing from ethnographical work in several sites over a period of sixteen years, Dempsey juxtaposes Hindu and Christian, Indian and Euroamerican religious expressions that take shape as folklore figures, democratizing theologies, sanctified terrain, and extraordinary human abilities. She uncovers how these expressions, all of which lend sacred meaning and power to the material realities of religious participants, push against systems promoting otherworldly abstractions. The book’s comparison of these religious modes deepens insights into the qualities and interpretations of the earthbound sacred, sheds light on contours otherwise obscured, and suggests possibilities for bridging human contingencies across religious and cultural divides. The method and structure of this book represent a two-tiered rebuttal to two similarly constructed critiques. A complaint commonly lodged against comparison is that it imposes abstractions that erase culturally embedded realities. Critics of religion view religious systems as likewise imposing spiritualized conceptions that neglect earthly realities. As both sets of critics see it, scholarly comparison and religion, dictated from above, easily lend themselves to imperialistic structures of oppression. Unsurprisingly, as frameworks that name and claim varieties of power, both are often guilty as charged. Yet by comparing contextually across religious and cultural divides, this book demonstrates how practitioners variously engage with religious forms and experiences that meet earthly concerns and dismantle oppressive abstractions in the process.