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While studying with Dutch art historian Hans Rookmaaker, a few of us were invited to his home for coffee and cookies. I noticed a religious print on his wall that lacked any of the aesthetic qualities he had taught us to look for. He noticed me standing in front of it and said without elaboration: "There are a lot of reasons beside aesthetic ones to hang something in one's house." True enough. But what are they, I wondered? Because it was a gift of a beloved aunt? Did it remind him of some event in his life? Or speak of God in a way that touched him deeply? He didn't tell us; indeed, the questions did not even figure in the art curriculum of that day, though Rookmaaker already knew they were important.

Much has changed in the study of art—and of religion—in the 25 years since that experience, and much of that change has come to focus on what to make of our everyday religious life—its artifacts and practices. Now an art historian at Valparaiso University, David Morgan, has written a book, published by a university press, about the "other" reasons for hanging things in one's living room, especially reasons connected with faith.

In 1993 Morgan ran an ad in 25 religious periodicals, asking people to comment on the role Warner Sallman's Head of Christ (or any of his other popular prints) played in their lives. The 531 responses provide the primary data for his project, though Morgan puts these responses in the context of a rich study of popular piety that stretches from the Middle Ages through the Reformation to Jonathan Edwards and Victorian America.

But why should people in universities pay any attention to this kind of popular religious art? Behind this question lies an important shift in cultural studies over the last generation. Increasingly scholars recognize the importance of everyday practices and the way people construct their world—even, or especially, with things they hang on their walls or stick on their refrigerators. Rather than seeing popular religious images as expressions of a "hegemonic" mass culture, Morgan underlines their character as collective representations that express a deeply felt communion with the unseen world. And rather than privileging aesthetic contemplation that reinforces class distinctions, Morgan wants to understand the way images become "the means by which space becomes familiar and personal" and grasp their role in making belief functional.

Though this is not his primary purpose, Morgan gathers important materials that would contribute to understanding the development of the Protestant imagination: The inward attention to the spoken and preached Word, and the focus on transforming spiritual experiences with their goal of encountering God. This focus leads inevitably to an emphasis on narrative and to a belittling of visual objects, which can illustrate but not embody truth. But does this not reflect an important theological weakness that refuses to take God's creation and Christ's incarnation with radical seriousness? And does this not lead to an inferior aesthetic that does not allow a full-bodied experience of will, emotion, and heart in the presence of images that challenge our world as well as secure it?

These reflections led me to a deeper question. If popular religious art developed in a milieu where these (primarily) theological corrections were made, I wondered, is there any reason why popular art cannot, in its own way, challenge as well as secure our world? David Morgan implies that it can, but his dichotomizing of high and low art, the one challenging the other securing our world, keeps him (and I suspect all of us) from fully appreciating this genre. Does not the art of, say, Georgia O'Keefe or Henri Matisse secure our world as well as challenge it? And in a world that always is in danger of falling apart around us, shaping images that comfort and sustain us may reflect a greater miracle than we scholars can recognize. I think David Morgan knows this, but scholarly publications, like most conversations about art in our century, have sometimes conspired to keep this fact a secret.

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