International conference on religion

25 May 2009

On Monday June 15 and Tuesday June 16, 2009, an international conference on religion will be held in Groningen, The Netherlands. This conference will be hosted by the programme committee of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO) research programme 'The Future of the Religious Past'. It will take place in the late medieval/early modern building of the Groningen Faculty of Theology and Religious Studies in the Centre of Groningen, not more than a quarter of an hour walking from the station.

The conference theme is Words. Research around Words focuses on the study of religion and its functional equivalents at what can be called the semantic level. Focusing on keywords, it concerns the meanings attached to various vocabularies, idioms and utterances, both on paper and on/in other media, such as wood, stone, video etc.; in addition, of course, the lack of words in places of silence. Needless to say, this focus entails the whole field of semantic innovation at the level of metaphorical language, of poetics and rhetoric, but also, albeit more indirectly, the 'alphabet' and 'grammar' of images and sounds. The Programme is directed to the twenty-first century, but historical, anthropological, psychological, sociological etc, approaches are of course also included.

Key note lectures will be given by Jack Miles, Christoph Auffarth, Michael Lambek, Pieter Nanninga, Jacqueline Borsje, Ernst van den Hemel, Oliver Leaman and Jack Miles. Speakers and discussants further include Geurt Henk van Kooten, Burcht Pranger, Arie Molendijk. Babette Hellemans, Asja Szafraniec, Sara Thejls, Jeroen Boekhoven, Markus Davidsen and Johan Roeland.

If you wish to attend this conference we kindly ask you to register before June 1, 2009. Please fill in the application form to register.

If you have any questions, please contact Marc Linssen, secretary of the programme committee, e-mail m.linssen@nwo.nl , (+)31 70 3440 625, or Ms Amy Trijzelaar, a.trijzelaar@nwo.nl.

Go to the application form
Go to the preliminary programme