Just the right touch: Redescribing religion as something ordinary

As part of an effort to model a version of the field in which religious things are no longer seen as special and therefore naturally set apart but, instead, are understood as but one more instance of historical and cultural human practices, this article offers a novel comparison of items that are not often placed into a relationship of similarity with one another (i.e. recent Olympic curling and faith healing). The article therefore aims to demonstrate what a more modest—yet rather more rigorous and theoretically driven—academic study of religion might look like in the future.