The everyday life of monks: English Benedictine identity and the performance of proximity

The idea that Christianity can be understood as a discontinuity between this-worldly and other-worldly, transcendent and immanent, has been called into question within the anthropology of Christianity by Cannell (2005, 2006). Drawing our attention to ‘the juxtaposition of the numinous and the banal’ (2005: 346), she challenges what she sees as a narrowly ascetic model. Indeed, as Webster (2013) has set out to show in his ethnography of Scottish Protestants, transcendence and immanence are rarely understandable as two opposed poles; rather, transcendence comes to be experienced as immanent, a presence in the everyday fabric of life.