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Practice 137

In this chapter, my task is to situate practice—a theoretical concept that
roots the analysis of ideas, social relations, and technologies in human
practical activity—as a concept that has shaped the scholarly study of
religion and media. To do so, I first consider everyday uses of the word
practice and sketch out four ways that the concept of practice has reoriented
the study of religion and media. Second, I provide a selective genealogy of
the theoretical concept of practice. I then discuss some of the most fruitful
practice-oriented theoretical and methodological approaches to the study
of religion and media. Finally, in the spirit of what Marx called “praxis,” I
consider how scholarly activity itself has been transformed by thinking with
practice and what transformations are yet to come.

“Everyday” uses of the notion of practice

Practice is a concept that attempts to bring together thought and action—both
how people think about the world they live in and what they do in it. At the
level of ordinary speech, two meanings of the word practice are frequently
employed when talking of religion. The first takes practice as a synonym for
customary activity, or action. Practices of prayer, meditation, or preaching
are all examples of activities that share some common characteristics across
religions. Though not all prayer looks or sounds the same, for example, it can
be categorized for the purposes of analysis as a communicative form usually
directed to a deity or spirit. In a second meaning, practice is repetitive action
undertaken to become better at something, whether playing piano or being
a compassionate human being. In this case, practice has a forward-looking,
ameliorative sense, implying commitment on the part of the practitioner.
Conventionally speaking, a “practicing” Christian, Buddhist, or Jew is one
who cultivates her or his religious identity not only as a question of intellectual
assent or accident of birth but in daily or weekly customary actions such as
going to church, meditation, or observing holy days. Interestingly, however,
we rarely speak of “practiced” Christians, Buddhists, or Jews as we would
of a “practiced liar,” implying that the job of cultivating religious identity is
never done.
The ceaseless job of scholars of religion, by contrast, is to utilize, theorize,
and critique concepts such as practice (and religion), recognizing how
particular concepts help us to understand complex cultural phenomena
while also being attentive to what certain concepts might prevent us from
seeing. Practice has brought into the purview of religious studies a multitude
of ways of “being religious” that have previously been largely ignored; for
example, scholarly attention to practice has brought to prominence the
religious lives of women and marginalized peoples, the role of religion
in seemingly “nonreligious” spheres, and the messiness and creativity of