It is such a pleasure to be writing the Afterword to a volume representing the study of vernacular religion in everyday life. It is especially exciting for me to see the concept applied to many different ethnographic contexts and creative expressions from England to Estonia. While there have been some excellent article collections about religious belief and practice over the last 40 years by American folklorists and European ethnologists published in special issues of scholarly journals or as conference proceedings (for example, Yoder 1974; Bringéus 1994; Gustavsson and Montez 1999; Barna 2001; Fikfak and Barna 2007; Wolf-Knuts 2009), this volume remarkably represents the first English language publication of a book of such articles by a press specifically addressing folkloristic research on religion and readily available for scholars to consult, for libraries to make available, and for students to read. Considering the great interest and consistent scholarship in this general area by folklorists and ethnologists (see Primiano 1997; 2010), it is surprising that such a collection is only now emerging in the second decade of the twenty-first century. Marion Bowman and Ülo Valk deserve much credit for their gathering and editing of these articles and for their general zeal and advocacy for this publication.

Folklore and ethnology as hybrid fields belonging to both the humanities and the social sciences are frequently misunderstood and underappreciated by scholars of religion, whose foundation and methods are often textual and historical, not ethnographic.