Theology

Description

Workshop organised by the Mellon-Funded Religious Diversity and the Secular University project at CRASSH.

Participation is free and open to everyone, but registration is required and scholars interested in participating are asked to commit to attending the full two days. To register please contact Judith Weik.

At this two-day international workshop we shall discuss six short, powerful essays by six-world-class scholars, reflecting on the ways theology as a discipline has understood religious diversity and how it has understood, negotiated and maintained its place in the secular university.

Religious diversity – the multiplicity of religions and of religious confessions within religious traditions – has been a constant factor in the lives of Jews, Christians and Muslims. Social historians have long studied religiously diverse societies, from ancient Palestine and Egypt to Medieval Spain to such Early Modern metropoles as Istanbul, Venice, Amsterdam and Philadelphia to the modern globalising West. Scholars of religion continue to illuminate countless ways in which religious traditions interact with others and indeed often define themselves in terms of others.

But what of the academic discipline of theology? How has theology wrestled and come to terms with religious diversity? In the Middle Ages, theology was one of the three original faculties of the university (alongside law and medicine); in Early Modern Europe, faculties of theology turned into central theatres for the confessionalisation of European Christendom. But how have the intellectual upheavals and transformations of modernity that followed the Enlightenment – the political emancipation of religious minorities, the disintegration of confessional tests for college admission, and the secularisation of science and academic research – changed this ancient academic discipline? How, in turn, has the discipline of theology reacted to both the ongoing religious diversification and the secularisation of the university and to the study of religion across the humanities and social sciences?  These and similar questions will guide our conversations.