David Newheiser et al., "Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding" (Bloomsbury, 2025)

Dec 27, 2025

David Newheiser, Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University, dives into the innovative concept that art-making can be a spiritual practice independent of religious belief. He discusses the collaborative Melbourne project that explores art as ritual and emphasizes material practices over biographies. Additionally, Newheiser connects art's epistemic role to power dynamics and colonial histories, highlighting its capacity for knowledge and democratic imagination. He also reflects on 'spiritual but not religious' sentiments and the transformative experiences art can provide.

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INSIGHT

Practice Over Content

Art-making can be studied like ritual by focusing on artists' material practices rather than symbolic content or biography.
These embodied practices generate non-propositional knowledge and insight about the world.

INSIGHT

Art Produces Non‑Propositional Knowledge

Knowledge from art is often understanding or insight rather than propositional facts.
Art shapes imagination and power just as much as it produces aesthetic feelings.

ANECDOTE

Museum As Ritual Space

Newheiser recounts visiting a Saint Francis exhibition where dimmed rooms and silent visitors created ritual-like attention.
He connects museum design to civic rituals that shape public habits and citizenship.

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Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding (Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2025), edited by Professor David Newheiser, is a new collection asks if it’s possible to consider art-making as a spiritual practice independent of explicit religious belief or content. Where earlier research has focused on the religious significance of secular artworks, this innovative volume turns its attention to the role of the artist, and to specific examples of art practices, putting them into conversation with ritual practices. By creating a web of connections that emerge across multiple disciplines and practices, a team of scholars and artists shed new light on the way art-making and ritual embody non-discursive forms of understanding. Drawing on the work of scholars who argue that ritual practice is central to religious identities, they use close analysis of specific examples to address philosophical issues about the nature of knowledge and spirituality and the relationship between them. Art-Making as Spiritual Practice is a rich and in-depth examination of the possibility that art has spiritual meanings that are endemic to the practice of art-making itself, establishing a new paradigm that changes the conversation surrounding the spiritual, if not religious, significance of art.

Professor David Newheiser is a returning champion on New Books in Secularism—he joined us in 2020 to talk about his book Hope in a Secular Age: Deconstruction, Negative Theology, and the Future of Faith (Cambridge University Press, 2020) and in 2023 he told us about his edited collection, The Varieties of Atheism (University of Chicago Press, 2022). He is Associate Professor of Religion at Florida State University, with research that explores the role of religious traditions in debates over ethics, politics, and culture. He received a PhD in Religion from the University of Chicago and an MPhil in early Christian thought from Oxford. He is also co-editor of the Journal for the Academic Study of Religion.

Art-Making as Spiritual Practice: Rituals of Embodied Understanding is an open source publication, available free from Bloomsbury Academic Press, here.

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Carrie Lynn Evans is a PhD candidate at Université Laval in Quebec City. carrie-lynn.evans@lit.ulaval.ca @carrielynnland.bsky.social

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