spiritual infrastructures

spiritual infrastructures

Kirsch, Thomas G. 2023. Spiritual Infrastructures. In Rethinking Infrastructure Across the Humanities; edited by Aron Pinnix, Axel Volmar, Fernando Esposito, and Nora Binder. Bielefeld: Transcript, 155-161.

In this article, I take inspiration from Marshall Sahlins’ recent plea to study immanentist societies in their own cultural terms so as to rethink infrastructures from a decisively non-secular vantage point. More particularly, I take the case of Pentecostalism to argue that what is required is to go beyond the focus on religious infrastructures, that is, the idea of human-made (secular) infrastructures that serve people’s religious aspirations, such as pilgrimage infrastructures. Instead, I aim at developing some preliminary thoughts on what I call spiritual infrastructures, which means perceiving the agency of spiritual entities as infrastructures.