The Center on Lived Religion (COLR)
The Center on Lived Religion (COLR) facilitates a deeper understanding of religion through research, teaching, and public engagement. Our work grows out of the Lived Religion in the Digital Age project (2018-2024), funded generously by the Henry Luce Foundation and Saint Louis University. Through fellowships, workshops, public lectures, and teaching, the mission of COLR is to develop more robust inquiry into and representation of religion as it is lived across the range of human experience and identity, both in our immediate communities and beyond.
Attuning to religion as it is lived — embodied, practiced, negotiated, applied, contested, activated, reimagined — yields insights into human experience while also casting stark light on the interpretive categories that have shaped the academic study of religion for generations. Such attention requires shifting analytic focus and points of dialogue from official teachings, creeds, and authorized texts of traditions to the messy, contradictory and imperfect fragments of embodied humanity. We seek not to replace but to enrich the important work of theological and religious study at SLU by forming an inherently interdisciplinary community of scholars and other professionals. To date, COLR is the only academic center in the United States exclusively dedicated to the study of lived religion.
COLR’s work sits at the nexus of academic research, public humanities, digital humanities and inclusive pedagogy. Specific center activities include convening academic colloquia, collaborating with campus and community partners in various public humanities and public scholarship efforts (art exhibits, community festivals, school partnerships, media collaborations, etc.), developing digital tools to promote the study and understanding of religion (Where's Religion?), and supporting graduate and undergraduate students in their formation as people for others.
Facts and Figures
- 17 digital development fellows
- 22 research fellows
- Four digital stories fellows
- Three religion and public life fellows
- Five community engagement fellows
- Six teaching fellows
- Four undergraduate fellows
- One artist in residence
- Five art curations
Where's Religion?
Where’s Religion? is an open-source mobile and desktop web application developed by humanities faculty and IT professionals at Saint Louis University that supports in-person research, remote data entry, media sharing and mapping. To do this, the mobile app enables users to collect fieldnotes, image, video and audio files — all of which are geotagged and timestamped. The desktop companion website/app provides a more feature-rich format to refine fieldnotes, edit media, make new entries or, for certain user profiles, review or grade other users’ entries.
When published, entries are automatically curated online within an interactive public map that has search and filter functions for enhanced usability. Where’s Religion? is conceptualized and designed for students, researchers, and public users to document and share their encounters with “religion” in everyday life — all with the intended purpose of democratizing data collection and visualizing religious and cultural diversity at scale.
The Where's Religion? mobile app is designed for researchers and students under the guidance of trained researchers to scaffold ethnographic and place-based research on religion.
The Where's Religion? website is open to anyone who wants to explore the interactive map and search uploaded content. It also includes a number of additional features for researchers who can login to access their Notes for editing.
We believe that it is time for our research methodologies in the humanities to catch up with the multisensory realities of human experience and that creating a platform for collecting, organizing, and sharing images, videos, and sounds, along with textual notations, sourced from a wide range of users, is a necessary place to start. From this conviction, Where’s Religion? is conceptualized and designed for diverse users with interests in sharing media and notes about their respective encounters with “religion” in everyday places. We aim to raise the significance of embodied practices and shared spaces, facilitated through collected multimodal media products, to the study of religion, and to prompt data-driven investigation of popular and disciplinary presumptions of what constitutes “religion.”