DEPARTMENT OF RELIGIOUS STUDIES

James S. Bielo is an anthropologist of religion, with an ethnographic focus on Christianity in the United States. His research interests center on materiality and language as lived resources in religious life, and the intimate relations of religion and power.

In 2021, Dr. Bielo published his fifth monograph – Materializing the Bible: Scripture, Sensation, Place – with the Bloomsbury Studies in Material Religion series. The book explores what happens when written scripture is transformed into experiential, choreographed environments. A diverse range of practices and places, from gardens and theme parks to shrines and museums, show how materializing the Bible works as an authorizing practice to intensify scriptural intimacies and circulate potent ideologies. For podcast interviews about the book, see Things Not Seen and New Books in Religion. Materializing the Bible is also an interactive digital scholarship project, designed with student research assistants and featuring contributions from interdisciplinary scholars. Dr. Bielo assembled a physical archive to complement the ethnographic fieldwork, which now resides as a special collection at Chicago’s Newberry Library. 

Bielo’s current ethnographic work focuses on the secondhand circulation of Christian material culture. Churches close. Producers stop producing. People die. Things survive. Every day, scores of items are exchanged through the networked assemblage of estate sales, thrift stores, flea markets, antique malls, auction houses, eBay, Instagram, and more. At the project's core are resellers: folks who scavenge secondhand venues in search of materials cast off as sacred waste, the vestiges of lived religion. Secondhand Sacred entails several forms of public scholarship. Physical exhibits are on display at the Martin Marty Center (U Chicago) and the C. H. Booth Public Library (Newtown, CT). In August 2024, Bielo co-launched Collecting Religion, a collaborative forum that explores the relationship between material religion and collecting as a research practice.

Dr. Bielo welcomes opportunities to mentor students in the ethnographic study of religion, material religion, expressive culture, digital scholarship, and American religions. 

Selected Works

Books

2021. Materializing the Bible: Scripture, Sensation, Place. London: Bloomsbury.
2018. Ark Encounter: The Making of a Creationist Theme Park. New York: NYU Press.
2015. Anthropology of Religion: The Basics. London: Routledge. 
2011. Emerging Evangelicals: Faith, Modernity, and the Desire for Authenticity. New York: NYU Press.
2009. Words upon the Word: An Ethnography of Evangelical Group Bible Study. New York: NYU Press.