In every culture, the relationship between religion and politics has been rather complex over time. Young PhD-students from Germany and the Netherlands present their research projects.
In the pre-modern period, symbolic acts always had a very powerful visual presence. Contemporaries considered parades, coronations, processions and consecrations to be ‘spectacula’.
The antique Kushite cemetery of Sanam is the main focus of the publication “The Kushite Cemetery of Sanam. A Non-Royal Burial Ground of the Nubian Capital” by Egyptologist Prof. Dr. Angelika Lohwasser from the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics”.
The Germans are much less tolerant of Muslims and other non-Christian religions than their Western European neighbours. This is the essential result of one of the largest representative surveys to date on religious plurality in Europe.
Numerous evangelical Protestant missionary societies were established throughout the nineteenth century to ‘civilise and Christianise’ the non-European Other, who came to the attention of Europeans through colonial expansion.
The coexistence of believers of different religions takes centre stage in the next lecture series of the cluster of excellence “Religion and Politics”. The series runs under the title of “Integration of Religious Plurality from the Ancient World to the Present”.
Even if traditional church and state relations cover a variety of different models ranging from strict separation to cooperation or establishment, it cannot be denied that all of them are influenced by well-known Christian forms of organisation.
Sanctuaries played an important role in the religious as well as in the political life of Greek federal states. The aim of the conference is an analysis of the interdependency between religion and politics of the Greek federal states.
The conference Iconic Turns will explore the multiple connections of religious and national identities in Eastern Europe after the ›turn‹ of 1989. The cinema will serve as focus, both as a powerful image-machine and a site of collective practices.
Musicologists Dominik Höink and Jürgen Heidrich analyze „Judas Maccabaeus“ from the perspective of different scientific disciplines such as musicology, theology history as well as English and Jewish studies.
The summer semester 2010 lecture series of the cluster of excellence “Religion and Politics” focuses on the formation of norms in the past and in the present. The lectures draw a chronological line from the Ten Commandments to modern constitutional law.
In its effort to define its own final legitimisations, politics is to a large extent bound to use religiously prefigured political languages. This is the line of argument furthered by the historians who convene a workshop within the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” in mid-February 2010.
While the humanities and social sciences view the ‘return of the Gods’ as recent social phenomenon in western societies, the recognition of an enduring prevalence of religion in the public sphere has been central in the anthropological discipline.
