Introduction

Abstract This introduction outlines the special section's intervention in the study of religion, property, and political economy, suggesting that the emerging literature on Middle Eastern Christianities can provide a clearer view of how economic relations are influenced by religious ones and vice versa. Engaging with scholarship on property relations on the one hand (within and beyond the Middle East) and Christianity on the other, the introduction proposes an approach to church property that holds the economic and religious aspects of property in productive tension. It attempts this both empirically, employing sources that elicit religious experience as well as larger social forces, and theoretically, challenging canned distinctions between sacred space and profane property in favor of a view that includes human and nonhuman relations.