Progressive religions: Liberal transformations of Catholicism and Islam in Europe

Basic data for this project

Description

This project analyses the emergence and negotiation of liberal Catholicism and Islam in Europe with a specific focus on the religion-gender nexus in liberal religious communities. It does so by following three lines of inquiry. First, it asks how progressive Catholics and Muslims understand and experience their religiosity in relation to liberal gender norms. In so doing, it aims at disentangling dynamics of de-coupling and re-coupling of the religion-gender nexus. Second, it focuses on the formation of liberal religious initiatives at the meso-level. Liberal mosque initiative and reform-movements within the Catholic Church are assessed by asking how actors manage grassroots expectations of their communities and the political and institutional pressures from their wider environment. Here, contrasting organisational change in relation to minority and majority conditions will be particularly interesting. Third, the project is interested in how global religious reform movements attampt to translate their ideas and believes into concrete politics and local initiatives and thereby connects to broader theoretical questions of global-local and religious-secular dynamics of translation. Overall, the project seeks to generate empiprical and theoretical contributions to debates over religious change at the individual and the meso-level as well as the dynamics of liberal religious movements.