Introduction

Abstract

In her classic work What is Documentation?, Suzanne Briet writes, “Is a star a document? Is a pebble rolled by a torrent a document? Is a living animal a document? No. But the photographs and the catalogues of stars, the stones in a museum of mineralogy, and the animals that are cataloged and shown in a zoo, are documents.” (Briet et al. 2006, p. 10). We might similarly say of religion that it is not itself a document, although it can be documented, perhaps through some technology of recording or testimony, perhaps even through display and observation, as an antelope in a zoo, and certainly through the enormous source literature of textual documentation produced by the world’s religions. Bringing religious studies and theology into conversation with documentation studies seems obvious: religious scribes were among the first professional document makers, and religious law, incantations, holy writ, and sacred genealogies all have long documentary histories. The semiotics of the Apostle Paul and Augustine of Hippo are easily traced to discussion of indexicality and aboutness in 20th and 21st century theories of documentation, as well as theories of documentality (see Ferraris 2013, pp. 281–286). In addition to being obvious, the field of religious documentation is necessary because of the new problems and opportunities it suggests. Significant work has already been done on religious documentation. To name only a few exemplary recent studies, Rachel Muers and Rhiannon Grant have proposed a documentary theology approach in research on Quaker history (Muers and Grant 2018). Tim Gorichanaz’s phenomenological research on sacred documents (Gorichanaz 2016), and the late Alease Brown’s research on protest speech, hashtags, and tattoos as articulating religious confession (Brown 2020) are recent examples of the generative possibilities of document studies both for sacred texts and non-text objects. All seek to show how religious life can be understood through communicative objects it generates, whether or not these objects are textual and independent of what their texts directly communicate. This special issue of JRTI contributes to the existing literature with three https://doi.org/10.1080/10477845.2022.2038048