Gregory Grieve’s research concerns everyday religious practice, particularly Buddhist practices, but also Hindu, Christian, and neo-Pagan. He works in the space between religious studies and communication studies. Religious studies is the secular study of religious phenomena that emphasizes critical, culturally and historically based cross-cultural analysis. Religious studies is anthropological and not theological, and asks questions not about the nature of the divine but rather uses religion to understand what it means to be human. Grieve came to these fields through semiotic studies, the science of communication that analyzes sign systems as they operate in various social contexts. From pixels on a computer screen to the wink of an eye, a sign is any material object that can be interpreted to have meaning.
