Smells and Bells

 Everyday Micropractices How ritual and religious experience can be found in the mundane By Josephine Mortrud SuperBowl snacks - dorm style Elizabeth Perez's book,  Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions,  explores how everyday practices can demonstrate profound religious and spiritual devotion. These "micropractices" are often overlooked by religious scholars as less important than elaborate rituals, but how we speak and eat plays an enormous role in how we think and interact with others, including the divine or supernatural. Perez writes, Blueberry muffins for the 4th of July "Practitioners gradually learn to master these micropractices through  intensely sensory apprenticeships  to authoritative members of their communities. [...] Since micropractices inhere in the everyday routines of local institutions, they can become  difficult, if not impossible, to discern as anything other than unremarkable backgroun...