"Harvey's ideas about religion are some of the most important and ground-breaking of our time. He demonstrates that religion is not about belief but about practices. This book will change the way we understand religion." - Douglas Ezzy, University of Tasmania "An exhilarating book. Harvey highlights the viscerally relational and conflict-laden force of religion, bringing into the conversation not just human actors but a variety of non-human agents." - Manuel A. Vasquez, University of Florida "Harvey takes the reader "elsewhere" in this tour de force. Exploring religion's everydayness, he shows how we are embodied, located, and performative in a multi-species world.

An intellectual page turner!" - Lois Ann Lorentzen, University of San Francisco Food, Sex and Strangers attends to more widespread religious activities than believing in or even worshipping deities. It challenges definitions of religion that emphasise belief in God because this is only one element of what only some religious people do when they do religion. It is interested in the braiding of religiosity with other everyday activities. Beginning with the Maori scholar T.P. Tawhai's definition of religious activity as doing violence with impunity, this book argues that religion is an integral element of many people's relationships with the wider world, an aspect of their dwelling among other beings (human or other-than-human) including those one might eat, meet or marry. In particular, it is a negotiation of differences and similarities between individuals and communities of many kinds. It is best seen in rules of encounter or avoidance rather than in affirmations of belief.

Food, Sex and Strangers gives definitional priority to commonplace activities among religious people rather than to peculiar metaphysics. It aims to provide a new foundation for studying religion(s) that does not give preference to themes arising from the history and polemics of only one religion.