Center for Religious Studies
The Center for Religious Studies (abbreviation: CERES) is a central scientific institution and a research department of the Ruhr University Bochum , which examines religions and religious formations in the past and present. It was founded in 2004 and has been independent of the faculty since 2015. The CERES is one of the largest German-speaking institutions in the field of religious studies . Five chairs are assigned to it and numerous other international research projects are based. As part of the teaching, a BA and an MA degree are offered, in which the students can focus on specific religious manifestations between Asia and Europe. In addition to research and teaching, another area is knowledge transfer .
Research priorities and projects
Teaching and research in religious studies at CERES is differentiated from the religion-immanent perspective, as it is u. a. theology represents, from and thus takes a systematic approach to the scientific external perspective. In geographical terms, the research focus is on the religious history of Asia and Europe. The CERES is interdisciplinary in its self-image and is characterized in the systematic area by a sociological approach to religions. The methodological approach is based on historical, philological , cultural and sociological approaches. This enables a multi-perspective study of religions, ranging from hermeneutic text work to religious aesthetic methods to the procedures of quantitative sociology. In this way, mutually beneficial access to religion in its historical and current forms can also be achieved. The interdisciplinary, English-language magazine Entangled Religions is published by an editorial collective employed at CERES, which is funded by the Käte Hamburger Kolleg .
Numerous research projects have been based at the Center for Religious Studies since it was founded. The focus is on the one hand the religious historical connections between Asia and Europe and on the other hand the current religious diversity in Germany.
- Käte Hamburger Kolleg “Dynamics of Religious History between Asia and Europe”, since 2008, financed by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research , founding director Volkhard Krech
- Research project JewsEast (Jews and Christians in the East: Strategies of Interaction between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean), since 2016, funded by the European Research Council
- Research project BuddhistRoad (Dynamics in Buddhist Networks in Eastern Central Asia 6th to 14th Centuries), since 2017, funded by the European Research Council
- Research college RePliR (Religious plurality and its regulation in the region), together with the Center for Religion and Modernity of the Westphalian Wilhelms-Universität Münster , since 2016, funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia
- Reinhart Koselleck Project Theory and Empiricism of Religious Evolution (THERE), since 2018, under the direction of Volkhard Krech , funded by the German Research Foundation
- Research project relNet (modeling of topics and structures of religious online communication), completed, led by Volkhard Krech, funded by the Mercator Research Center Ruhr
- Religious diversity in North Rhine-Westphalia, completed, funded by the Ministry of Culture and Science of North Rhine-Westphalia
people
- Volkhard Krech - religious scholar and founding director of CERES
- Carmen Meinert - Tibetologist and Sinologist
- Volker Beck - Member of the Bundestag and lecturer at CERES
- Martin Rademacher - religious scholar
- Alexandra Cuffel - Judaist and Medievalist
- Kianoosh Rezania - Professor of West Asian Religious History
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Catholic news agency: From the Bundestag to the lecture hall. Domradio.de, October 12, 2017, accessed on July 30, 2018 .