Contesting Religious Identities: Transformations, Disseminations and Mediations

Religion is a hot topic on the public stages of ’secular’ societies, not in its individualized liberal or orthodox form, but rather as a public statement, challenging the divide between the secular neutral space and the religious. In this new challenging modus, religion raises questions about identity, power, rationality, subjectivity, law and safety, but above all: religion questions, contests and even blurs the borders between the public and the private. These phenomena urge to rethink what are often considered to be clear differences between religions, between the public and the private and between the religious and the secular. In this volume scholars from a range of different disciplines map the different aspects of the dynamics of changing, contesting and contested religious identities.

Bob Becking is emeritus senior research professor for Bible, Religion and Identity at the University of Utrecht. His research focuses on the impact of societal changes for the construction of religious identities in ancient Israel. He was co-editor of the Dictionary of Deities and Demons in the Bible (Brill 1995; 1999). His most recent book is: Ezra, Nehemiah, and the Construction of Early Jewish Identity (Mohr Siebeck 2011).

Anne-Marie Korte is professor of religion, gender and modernity at Utrecht University. Her publications include ’Sacred Symbols of the City: Babel, Barbara and their Towers’. In L. Gómez & W. van Herck (Eds.), The Sacred in the City(pp. 127-140). London/New York: Continuum, 2012 and has edited, together with A.K.H. Berlis and K. Biezeveld, Holiness and Homeliness: The Sacred and Everyday Life. Leiden: Brill, 2012.

Lucien van Liere is associated professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University. His research focus is on profiles of religion during violent conflicts. He has published extensively on religion-related violence, a.o. Teasing islam - Islam as the other side of tolerance in contemporary Dutch politics. Journal of Contemporary Religion, 29 (2014) 2, (pp. 187-202) and has co-edited Images of Enmity and Hope, The Transformative Power of Religion in Conflict (Lit, 2014).

Contributors are: Bob Becking, Henk van den Belt, Claudia Camp, Joachim Duyndam, Patrick Eisenlohr, Anja Finger, Martha T. Frederiks, Nilüfer Göle, Fadi Hirzalla, Adriaan van Klinken, Anne-Marie Korte, Lucien van Liere, Eric Ottenheijm, William Peterson, Tina Pippin, Joerg Rieger, Anna Strhan & Liesbeth van Zoonen.