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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David N. Hempton

Harvard Divinity School

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David Hempton is John Lord O’Brian Professor of Divinity and Dean of Harvard Divinity School. He held prior appointments as Director of the School of History at Queen’s University Belfast and distinguished University Professor at Boston University. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and an Honorary Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He has delivered the Cadbury Lectures at the University of Birmingham, the F. D. Maurice Lectures at King’s College, London, and the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh.

His books include Methodism and Politics in British Society 1750-1850 (Stanford University Press, 1984), winner of the Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society; Methodism: Empire of the Spirit (Yale University Press, 2005), Evangelical Disenchantment: Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt (Yale University Press, 2008), The Church in the Long Eighteenth Century (I. B. Tauris, 2011), winner of the Albert C. Outler Prize of the American Society of Church History; and most recently (with Hugh McLeod), Secularization and Religious Innovation in the North Atlantic World (Oxford University Press, 2017). He is currently preparing a book from the 2021 Gifford Lectures.

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Oddrun M. H. Bråten

Norwegian University of Science and Technology

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Oddrun M. H. Bråten is Professor of Religions and Worldviews Education at the Institute of Teacher Education, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, Norway. She received her Doctoral Degree in Education from the University of Warwick, UK and her Master’s Degree in Religious Studies from the University of Bergen, Norway.

Her research consists of international and comparative studies about religion and worldviews education, empirical classroom studies, and studies on worldviews in education.

She leads of NTNU RE Research Group.

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Madlen Krüger

Institute for Interdisciplinary Research, Heidelberg

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Dr. Madlen Krueger is a Research Fellow with the Department of Peace at the Protestant Institute for Interdisciplinary Research (FEST) in Heidelberg. She is currently working in a project on religions, diplomacy and peace funded by the German Foreign Office. She has done extensive research on religious diversity. Most recently in a research project on Myanmar and religious diversity at the University of Muenster and as a senior fellow in the research group Multiple Secularities - Beyond the West, Beyond Modernities at the University of Leipzig. Her research focuses particularly on the relation between religion and politics, religion and violence and religious diversity. In her research, she specifically addresses the regions of South and Southeast Asia. She has studied religious studies and South Asian studies (University of Leipzig; JNU Delhi).

Her most recent work includes Ethnic and Religious Diversity in Myanmar (ed. with P. Schmidt-Leukel and H.-P. Grosshans, Bloomsbury Academics 2022).

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Halina Grzymała-Moszczyńska

International Association for the Psychology of Religion

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Halina Grzymała-Moszczyńska is Full Professor of Psychology at the Jagiellonian University and  Jesuit University Ignatianum in Cracow, Poland. She serves as Chair of the Department of Psychology of Religion and Spirituality and as President of the International Association for the Psychology of Religion since 2019. Her research and teaching areas are: psychology of migration (with 25 years of experience in refugee research); psychology of religion and spirituality.

Grzymała-Moszczyńska most relevant recent publications are:

• A.Anczyk,A.,H. Grzymała-Moszczyńska (2021), The Psychology of Migration: Facing Cultural and Religious Diversity, Leiden-Boston: Brill.

• A.Anczyk, H. Grzymała-Moszczyńska, A. Krzysztof-Świderska, J. Prusak (2020), Which psychology(ies) serves us best? Research perspectives on the psycho-cultural interface in the psychology of religion(s), Archive for the Psychology of Religion.

• A. Anczyk, H. Grzymała-Moszczyńska (2020), Psychology of religion(s) within religious studies: into the future, Religion, 50(1), p. 24-31.

• H. Grzymała-Moszczyńska, M. Kanal (2019), Research on forced migration from the perspective of the psychology of religion: Opportunities and challenges, Archive for the Psychology of Religion, 41(3), pp. 204-215.

• A. Anczyk, H. Grzymała-Moszczyńska, A. Krzysztof-Świderska, J. Prusak, The Replication Crisis and Qualitative Research in the Psychology of Religion, The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 29(4), pp. 278-291.

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