Identity in the face of Religious Plurality. A qualitative-reconstructive approach on conditions and impacts regarding Interreligious Communication

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Gritt Klinkhammer
• Subject Area: Religious Studies and Jewish Studies
• Term: from 2014 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 251766859

The variety of cultures, heterogeneity of lifestyles and plurality of religious ideas has been a challenging subject of diverse scientific disciplines. In this regard, questions about recognition of cultural, social and personal identity, as well as about the relationship between the stranger and the intimate contour the field of reflections in cultural and social studies. Some studies are also given special attention in the field of religious plurality and interreligious encounter and communication. However, the religion seems problematic to integrate into the above mentioned debate. At least in emic perspective, interreligious encounter and communication, additionally, are dealt with in terms of claims of transcendent truth, which are possibly connected to intangible authority. In this respect, interreligious communication does not only aim at the negotiation of the limits of mutual toleration, but, furthermore, at the struggle for recognition of intangible claims of truth. Religious plurality, in this view, appears dangerous and unavoidably triggers the clash of civilizations (Huntington 1998).In contrast, the submitted project sets the assumption that spaces of interreligious encounter and communication, like these, which have been founded after 9/11 as initiatives of interreligious dialogue, have established unique spaces of religious dynamics where religious personal and social hybrid identities have emerged beyond traditional tolerance concessions and/or strict limitations of the monotheistic religions claim of absoluteness.With reconstructive methods the project intends to analyze how continuous interreligious communication as it takes place in initiatives of interreligious dialogue influences the common work on of members. The aim of the project is to generate a grounded theory of religious Identity in the face experiences of religious plurality in a social near range. Here, not only the actors cognitive processes of treatment and their subjective theories are of interest, but their conflicts, delineation, harmonization, or mixtures of religious generation of sense on a biographical level. The project will also look at the gateways of the break down and abandonment of interreligious communication.Therefore, the project analyzes for the first time which biographical dynamics are generated by continuously interreligious communication respective experiences of religious plurality in social close-range. The project thus contributes to the history of modern religiosity and to the debates on secularization and transformation of religion in modern societies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants