Items from a colorful, intriguing and still-growing collection of religious items have been on display at C.H. Booth Library for months. Readers will soon have an opportunity to learn from the project’s co-curator what led to the still-growing “Secondhand Sacred” collection.

Visitors to 25 Main Street were introduced to Secondhand Sacred last summer. “Secondhand Sacred: (Ir)Reverent Fun” presented ephemeral items based in religion in side by side display cases on the third floor of the Main Street institution.

By mid-October, “Secondhand Sacred: Domestic Devotion” was installed in one of the display cases on the first floor of the library. Also part of the Secondhand Sacred project, the presentation offered a fraction of the curated collection of James Bielo, a Newtown resident and an associate professor of religious studies at Weinberg College of Arts & Sciences who continues to find and curate items into his research project in the anthropology of religion.

Through April 30, “Secondhand Sacred: Wearing and Carrying,” in the library’s third floor John Angel Gallery, showcases materials that have been divested by previous owners — cast off as sacred waste, vestiges of lived religion. The objects displayed are both personal and public. Some objects are Catholic, others Protestant, and others less decided.

Items have been found through estate sales, thrift stores, flea markets, antique malls, auction houses, eBay, Instagram, and gift exchanges.

The Newtown presentation is the second for the “Secondhand Sacred” collections. The project debuted at The Martin Marty Center (University of Chicago) in mid-September, where it was exhibited for three months.

Bielo’s fieldwork, according to his website (2ndhandreligion.com), explores the circulation of these Christian items by the full- and part-time sellers who search (“scavenge,” his website states) secondhand venues in search of donated, discarded and passed-over items.

As a banner across one page of 2ndhandreligion.com states: Churches close. Producers stop producing. People die. Things survive. Bielo’s goal is to better understand how Christian material culture is circulated through secondhand economies.

For those who would like to learn about the collection from its curator, Bielo is scheduled to speak at the library on Saturday, April 12, at 2 pm. He will offer an introduction to how the work got started and how it has evolved to feature public exhibitions at his hometown library as well as at the University of Chicago.

Registration is requested for the 90-minute program. It is available at chboothlibrary.org or by calling 203-426-4533.