Interdisciplinary conference on March 24^th and 25^th 2022 at the Faculty of Catholic Theology of the University of Salzburg, Universitätsplatz 1, Salzburg, HS 101 (ground floor) on the topic of “Provocation Religion”. The conference will be held in German only.

Religion provokes – through (young) people who seriously follow a religious orientation; through the presence of religious symbols in the social public sphere; through the shaping of politics, as is currently happening, for example, through the Russian Orthodox Church, Sunni and Shiite forms of Islam, neo-Pentecostal currents in West Africa and South America, or representatives of the Hindutva movement in India; and last but not least, through the astonishing interest in spirituality and new religious movements in Western societies. Even if the theory of secularization may have more explanatory power than is granted to it by the concept of a “return of religion,” there can no longer be any question of a monocausal, irreversible and evolutionistically conceived dynamic of secularization today, as José Casanova, for example, made clear with his reference to the relevance of “public religions” (1994), or Jürgen Habermas with his diagnosis of a “post-secular society” (2001).

This political, cultural, and intellectual provocation that “religion” represents is what the Center for Intercultural Theology and the Study of Religions wants to pursue through an interdisciplinary conference, addressing the following questions in particular:

• How is the study of religion at a university to be positioned in the field of tension between secularist repression, neoconservative instrumentalization and media staging of “religion”?
• Which dimensions of lived religion or which interactions between religion(s) and contemporary society can be explored by an intercultural-theological and an empirical-religious studies approach?
• What approaches, analyses and insights do Religious Studies and Intercultural Theology bring to the interdisciplinary work of the University of Salzburg?
• What potential lies in the “provocation religion”, and what dangers are to be pointed out in the field of tension “religion and society”?

• poster
• flyer