KEYNOTE LECTURES 2022

 

RELIGION AND DIVERSITY

Diversity characterises internal dynamics and external relations of all religious faiths in their different dimensions: texts – in their origins, exegesis, hermeneutics, critical editions; cults – in their anthropology, esthetics, adaptations; norms – in their sources, implementation, collection; doctrines – with their languages, narratives, transmissions; practices – in their motivation, evolution, connection or antagonism with other societal actors. A complex system with multiple variants which is usually reduced to a “dialogic dimension” which finds its most visible reasons and outcomes in the way societies transform and represent it into their political, juridical, social systems, but also in the ways that the faith communities generate dialogue or conflict within themselves and towards other communities (religious and non-religious).

Religious diversity offers therefore a wide spectrum for scholars working on its facets and impact, on the public and intimate life of people, social attitudes and behaviours, political choices and instances, cultural and economic dimensions all along the history from classical religions to more recent aspects.

Theologies, history and historiography, law and its political implementation, political balances, social practices and relations, cultural approaches and sensibilities have a role in describing, defining, ruling, and representing religious diversity in the varieties it assumes in different times and places. They have a role in constructing paradigms, identifying processes of accommodation, justifying conflicts, promoting change, detecting languages, and driving understanding.

The questions that will be addressed by this years' overarching topic are:

• How the past of diversity has been and still is re-elaborated to deny or boost violence;

• How diversity became, since the classical cultures, a reason to close or open the divide between public power and the religious understanding of it;

• How can religious diversity be detected and critically identified through indirect sources like international treaties, constitutions, laws, and artistic representations from the antiquity onward;

• What role education had all along its history until today and with the most different paradigms in shaping and/or managing religious diversity;

• What linguistic paradigms are (de)coded to manage diversity in given cultural areas;

• How did theologies and doctrines develop and are still developing towards the shaping of languages and practices of diversity.

Scholars from all the scientific disciplines studying religions in all their different forms and in their diachronic and synchronic variety are invited to apply. The European Academy of Religion welcomes also seminars and focus groups of other societies, academies, research teams, journals, departments and research centres.

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Francesca Cadeddu, President of the European Academy of Religion

Fondazione per le science religiose (FSCIRE)

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More information about the lecturers will be announced on this page in the next months.

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