Religion and Spirituality
Religions for Peace is committed to leading effective multi-religious responses to the world’s pressing issues. We believe ambitious goals and complex problems can best be tackled when different faith communities work together.
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Welcome to the INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON RELIGION & SPIRITUALITY IN PEACE SOCIETY (ICRSPS2024)
Historically as well as in the present day, the spaces created for religion frequently reflect the meaning of the religion itself. Christian churches, Buddhist temples, Muslim mosques, monasteries, hermitages, and ashrams are places where the believer prays, learns and interacts with their companions in belief. In these places, the believer also carries out many of the rites of passage that configure and mark the most important moments of their life. Outside of these special places, there is debate in today’s secularized societies on the extent to which religion can appropriate the public space to make itself visible.
Since prehistory, religion is reflected in individual or group movements towards destinations that are considered privileged in terms of the religious experience that is lived. In these spaces, religion manifests itself in a very special way. Such places are visited either seasonally, functionally, or because the religious group obtains a special identity or an individual collective benefit, from healing to contemplation. In the case of contemplation, the experiential is intimately linked to a space, in this case, configured to seek a state of stillness and rest.
Finally, religions migrate throughout the world taking their characteristic configurations of space with them. These movements may be matters of necessity, in the case of social crisis and conflict. Or they may be voluntary, arising from missionary desire. The movement of religions has been a constant throughout history, but today it constitutes a fact that decisively accompanies current migratory movements, giving rise to complex societies where the role of religion as an identity factor and as a presence in built spaces is strengthened or weakened, depending on the context.
Religion and Spirituality in Peace Society
Not that religion and spirituality can, in their very nature, ever be neutral subjects of discussion. In fact, religion is one of the most interest-laden of all discussions; religion supplies meanings in the world. Spirituality is an ultimate source of interest. Religion provides an account of human origins, responsibilities, and destinies. It sets out to explain the nature of being and it creates a framework for interpreting human action according to principles of good and evil.
Religion’s stance is not only interest-intensive. It is also transcendental. Religion strives to reach beyond the lifeworld, grasping deeper meanings that may not always be self-evident in the ordinariness of everyday experience. This much can be said of religion in general. As for religions in particular, the range is as wide as the cultural experiences of human beings.
“First nations” or indigenous peoples practiced a broad range of immanentist religions, including variants of totemism, animism, nature worship, shamanism, and ancestor worship—perhaps, in one perspective, for as long as the one hundred thousand years or more of our existence as a species. Religion, then, was less a separate institutional, spatial, and temporal space than it became in subsequent moments of human history. Religious meanings were deeply and integrally layered into the material and social worlds, thus representing a belief in the pervasive immanence of spiritual powers in natural circumstances and human affairs.
From about five thousand years ago, religious modes took a radically new textual-narrative form in conjunction with parallel revolutions in agriculture, the domestication of animals, village or city dwelling, the invention of writing, and institutionalized economic class inequality. The new religions are rarely unequivocally monotheistic (monotheistic systems of deity mostly have multiple personalities and deified prophets or saints). Nor are they simply polytheistic (polytheistic systems of deity mostly have hierarchies of major and lesser deity). Their key features are the progressive solidification of religious expression into sacred texts, sanctified buildings, and the institutional formation of a class of priestly interpreters and intermediaries. The common modes of meaning of these second-phase religions are even signified at times to the extent of sharing historic origins or exemplary persons and narratives.
Religious meanings took a third paradigmatic turn with the arrival of modernity. Or, more to the point, a new mode of spirituality emerges in a parallel universe of meaning alongside the persistence of the first two. For the first time in human history, modernity provides an alternative meaning system which is areligious—based on mixes of the epistemes of science, civic law, economic progress, vernacular materialism, and human reason. At the same time, atheism and agnosticism emerge as engaged counterpoints to religion.
Religion, nevertheless, powerfully persists in forms characteristic of all three of these world-historic moments of meaning-ascription. Modern, liberal reinterpretations of second-phase world religions recast sacred cosmologies as metaphorical and are not incompatible with science. They perform re-readings of sacred narratives in the light of modernity’s ethical aspirations such as for gender equality, human biomastery, non-violence, and material wellbeing for all. The shift is so profound that these modes of religiously might be characterized as third phase.
Meanwhile, others insist on holding to the truths of second-phase religiosity. In practice, they do this by means of textual literalism, religious fundamentalism, and didactic religious education. The chasm between liberal and fundamentalist religiosity in modernity at times seems as great as that between religionists and anti-religionists. And, to add an original layer to our contemporary complexity, first nation religions persist, and at times thrive, while revivals of immanentist religion are found in “new age” and other such spiritualities.
Today, the search for meaning-grounds can only be described as a scene of unprecedented pluralism. To this, we can react in several ways. We can adopt pluralism as a modern value and strive for shared meanings and harmony in difference on earth. Or, we can regard pluralism as a force undermining the integrity of religion and, with it, the communal distinctiveness of specific religious ways of life—in this frame of reference pluralism is an aspect of modernity that should be resisted.
The scope of this conference, journal, book series, and online Research Network is as broad as possible in the field of religious studies. Together, these forums seek to create a space for the representation of any and all perspectives on the role of religion and spirituality in society. We also welcome a wide variety of disciplinary practices. The perspectives captured in these spaces range from committed within-religion views, to comparative or pan-religious views, to areligious empirical or theoretical readings of the role of religion and spirituality in society. Above all, they provide spaces for open dialogue on the sources of foundational or essential meaning.