Behaving like Heathens?
Everyday experience demonstrates that offenses, swearing and abusive language tend to involve explicit or implicit comparisons. Within the history of religion, the phenomenon is similarly familiar: Bad Christians were accused of being like - or worse than - Turks or Jews, Jews were admonished not to fall so low as to behave like Christians and so on. Studying such comparisons, we set out to explore the relationship between polemics, orders of knowledge, and concepts of religion. Bringing together scholars of different religious traditions and periods, the conference proposes to take an interdisciplinary and systematic view on religious diversity and polemical comparison. The papers trace polemical comparisons from Late Antiquity to modern times and across Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Buddhist discourses.
Veranstalter:
Dr. Christina Brauner
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin/Universität Bielefeld,
SFB 1288 "Practices of Comparing"
christina.brauner@hu-berlin.de
Junior-Prof. Dr. Sita Steckel
Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster,
Dilthey project "Diversitas Religionum. Thirteenth-century Foundations of European Discourses of Religious Diversity"
sita.steckel@uni-muenster.de