Dynamics and Varieties of Religion and Religious Movements

Short description:

Three projects are grouped within this umbrellaproject. They all deal with ethnological and historical research on variations within religious culture of everyday life in modern Western society. The research focus is not on the institutionalized churches, but on vernacular or lived religion and on alternative and new forms of religion and new religious movements. Theme’s as civil religion and implicit religion will be adressed. From a historical perspective research is executed on the culture wars of the 19th century and the mutual influencing of religious practices in relation to church, state and society.
Shrines and Pilgrimage
Historical-anthropological research on sacred sites and spaces, the idolization and veneration of persons and objects, and pilgrimage and its material culture in Western culture.
Apparitions in Contestation
Research on marginal conservative catholic communities and religious movements, usually related to non-acknowledged devotional cults and Marian apparitions, which articulate themselves in contestative, heterodox ways in writing, messsages or performances in order to resist modernity and modernistic themes and developments in church and society.
Implicit Religion
Research on hidden or implicit forms of religiosity verborgen in everyday life and which seem not to be related to traditonal, churchly forms of religion  (like civil religion, silence, nrm’s).