PARADIGM SHIFT

 

The expression “paradigm shift” - which came to prominence after the publication of American physicist and philosopher Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962) - far from fostering a relativist view of belief systems, can be fruitfully applied to scholarship regarding religion to flesh out and highlight when and how the multiple disciplines of the broader field of religious studies found ways (or were inevitably led) to change their own perspectives and the manner of defining, reading and analysing the objects of their analyses through the positive or conflictual engagement (or lack thereof) with major historical events, the use of innovative theoretical lenses to further understand the significance of what Jean Delumeau called the fait religieux, the adoption of brand new or established technologies bringing to disruptive discoveries, and the ways in which one or more katastrophé of the Anthropocene were read, or continue to be read, as apocalypses or vice versa in the historiography on religious history.

 

EuARe2024 will focus the keynote lectures and encourage the presentation of panels and papers on topics, by way of example, such as:

• Groundbreaking authors (e.g. Eusebius as the creator of a “historical” Christian literary genre);

• Groundbreaking events (e.g. the discovery of the Qumran Bible manuscripts);

• Collapses of capitals, key cities and empires and their religious meaning (e.g. Jerusalem, Constantinople, the Mongol Empire, Granada);

• Shifts of paradigm in the perception of Otherness (e.g. the religious significance of the Spanish conquest of South America);

• Shifting patterns between reform and break (e.g. the tension between confessional concord/religious peace and political tolerance in the early modern wars of religion);

• Paradigm changes in the perception, use and misuse of the fait religieux (e.g. the French Revolution and the secularisation of Western Europe);

• Historical crises (cfr. Reinhart Koselleck) as drivers of religious change (e.g. the rise and fall of the Ottoman Empire or Pahlavi Iran), and religious crises as drivers of historical change;

• The political use of historical-religious paradigms;

• The Holocaust as a change of paradigm for theologies and theodicies.

 

Scientific associations and academies are warmly invited to participate in a scientific debate on who, what, where and when they changed their own way of looking at sources, events, methodologies or disciplinary structures.

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Keynote lectures will be announced in the coming weeks.

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