1st Edition

Interreligious Encounters in Europe Sites, Materialities and Practices

    266 Pages 18 B/W Illustrations
    by Routledge

    This book examines interreligious dialogue in Europe and how interreligious encounters are framed, expressed and practised. Throughout Europe religious identities have increasingly become significant categories within debates on migration, cohesion, diversity and belonging. By focusing on the spatialities, materialities and practices of interreligious dialogues and encounters, the volume sheds light on the heterogeneous domains where the visibility and inclusion of religious and cultural differences are currently negotiated and contested. The chapters draw on social science perspectives and include a range of empirical case studies from a variety of European settings. The contributions (a) shed light on the subjectivities, relations and modes of behaviour produced, negotiated and contested in and through locally embedded interreligious encounters and dialogue-oriented practices, (b) observe the power dynamics that shape those practices and encounters and (c) discuss their implications for the place(s) of religion in the public sphere. Overall the book contributes to a better understanding of how cultural, religious and political identities are reconfigured across Europe.

    Introduction: The Sites, Materialities and Practices of Interreligious Encounters in Europe

    Julia Martínez-Ariño, Laura Haddad, Jan Winkler and Giulia Mezzetti

    Part I The Sites of Interreligious Encounters

    1 Spatializing Interreligious Practice: Interreligious Place-making in a German Metropolitan Area

    Alexander-Kenneth Nagel

    2 Community and Interfaith Dialogue in Bosnia and Herzegovina: Searching for ‘mjesto susreta’

    Marika Djolai

    3 Provincializing Dialogue: Post-secular Governance Networks and the Brokerage of Religious Diversity in a North German Town

    Arndt Emmerich

    Part II The Materialities of Interreligious Encounters

    4 Architectures of Tolerance: Muslims, Alevis and the Impossible Promise of Berlin’s House of One

    Marian Burchardt and Johanna Haering

    5 The Materiality and Aesthetics of the City in Dialogue: The Case of the Day of Islam in the Catholic Church in Poland

    Dominika Motak and Joanna Krotofil

    6 The Affective Machines of Dialogue: Materializations of Identities/Differences in the Assemblages of an Exhibition About Everyday Muslim Life

    Jan Winkler

    Part III The Practices of Interreligious Encounters

    7 Dialogic Art: The Photographer Peter Sanders on Promoting Understanding

    Jonas Otterbeck

    8 Local Connections in an Increasingly Polarized Nation? Examining the British Context for Multifaith Social Action and Interfaith Dialogue from 1997 to the Present

    Melanie Prideaux and Tim Mortimer

    9 Atmospheric Encounters: Interfaith Dialogue in a Multifaith Neighbourhood of Copenhagen

    Lise Paulsen Galal and Kirsten Hvenegård-Lassen

    Afterword

    Laura Haddad, Jan Winkler, Julia Martínez-Ariño and Giulia Mezzetti

    Biography

    Jan Winkler is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Institute of Geography at Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Germany.

    Laura Haddad is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Institute of Sociology (Cultural Sociology), at Georg-August-University Gottingen, Germany.

    Julia Martínez-Ariño is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Religion, Culture and Society at the University of Groningen, The Netherlands.

    Giulia Mezzetti is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, Italy.