We are delighted to announce that we will be hosting an open panel at the 2025 annual conference of the European Academy of Religion in Vienna! The open panel will focus on the theme ”Future of Academic Theology”, and a number of our members will present. You can submit a paper until April 4th on the website of the EuARe. We are looking forward to your contribution! Please find more information about the conference on their website.

Panel description: What is the future of academic theology and religious studies at public universities in Western Europe? This question frequently resurfaces in various contexts in Europe, where sociocultural changes as well as theoretical critiques have been challenging the self-evident position of theology at public universities. As a relatively novel discipline, religious studies has sometimes been advanced as the more scientific and neutral heir of theology, catering to the needs of these altered circumstances. But religious studies has problems of its own, such as whether it can uphold a disciplinary identity and unity without a conception of religion that bears significant traces of its inheritance from Christian (protestant) theology. The project group The Future of Academic Theology (FOAT) of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (itself home to an interdisciplinary, multi-religious ‘TRS’ faculty) has taken upon itself to advance this debate, by addressing this topic head-on. As resembled in the title, the project takes its vantage point in the pivotal assumption that somehow, the future of this field has to be decided with reference to dichotomies that are inherently connected to this matter. Theology and religious studies, sometimes juxtaposed as religious science and science of religion, appear to be each other’s mirror image, in a similar way as the categories of ‘secular’ and ‘religious’, or ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’, seem to co-constitute one another. Acknowledging the contextuality of these imaginations, the FOAT project seeks to draft various configurations, as well as means of understanding theology and religious, in the wake of contextual variations on the secular/religious theme. Stressing the importance of a multi-perspectival, international discussion of this matter, we welcome anyone who wishes to think along with our endeavor to contribute to our panel.