Minna Opas

Academic Program Chair

XV SALSA Biennial Conference: Helsinki, 3-6 August 2025

Minna Opas is Professor of Study of Religion (fixed-term), University of Turku, Finland. She is Director of the Centre for the Study of Christian Cultures (cscc.utu.fi) and co-editor in-chief of Temenos: Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion.

Minna Opas is an ethnographer of religion. She is interested in questions related to the anthropology of Christianity and indigenous religions and cultures. Driven by the aim to understand religion as lived, she has studied Christianity especially in the Amazonian indigenous context, concentrating on questions of materiality, corporeality, religious imagination, and interdenominational relations. Her recent publications on Christianity include a special journal issue of Anthropological Quarterly titled Institutions, Infrastructures, and Religious Sociality: The Difference Denominations Make (co-edited with Courtney Handman), and a co-edited volume Christianity and Limits of Materiality (with Anna Haapalainen, Bloomsbury). She is the director of the Centre for the Study of Christian Cultures (cscc.utu.fi) at the University of Turku and co-editor in-chief of Temenos: Nordic Journal of Comparative Religion.

Mina Opas’ institutional webpage: https://www.utu.fi/en/people/minna-opas