PROGRAMME AND ABSTRACTS - Università degli Studi di Messina

PANEL 4
Tue 15 th , 9.00-11.40, Classroom 13
Sarah Claerhout, Ghent University, Belgium
The European Experience and the Concept of Religion
Today, several scholars question the utility of ‘religion’ as an analytical tool, its clarity as a
term, its theological neutrality and its validity as a description of reality. Some call for
abandoning the concept altogether, while others suggest that it has distorted the traditions of
nonwestern cultures rather than describing them. Some say that religion has no ontological
reality, but is always a construct; others propose that particular religions like ‘Hinduism’,
‘Buddhism’, ‘Taoism’, are creations of the modern West. Many of these challenges to the
concept of religion appear cogent, but they present us with a perplexing puzzle that has not
been sufficiently appreciated: generations of Europeans from the early modern period until
today have perceived religion in their own culture and in the alien cultures they encountered.
The concept of religion helped them to give structure to their experience of themselves and of
other cultures. If the concept of religion is all that problematic, how do we explain the fact that
it was central to the European cultural experience for centuries on end? Did Europeans
hallucinate when they saw religions, did they all make basic cognitive mistakes, or were they
merely under the influence of particular power constellations? This panel will explore the role
of the concept of religion in the modern European experience. By looking at different historical
and cultural contexts, it will trace the process through which Europeans recognized themselves
and others in the descriptions in terms of ‘religion’. Focusing on the European experience of
India in particular, the papers will examine the relation of the concept of religion to other basic
concepts central to how Europe understood itself and others, such as ‘nation’, ‘conversion’,
‘the secular’, ‘human nature’.
9.00 Philippe Bornet "Nature" and "Religion" in missionary accounts (18th-19th
centuries)
9.20 Sarah Claerhout Conversion, Religion and the Protestant Reformation
9.40 Jakob De Roover ‘Religion’ and the European Conception of Human Nature
10.00 Raf Gelders The Indian Religion by Any Other Name
10.20 Marianne
Keppens
11.00 Discussion
11.20 Discussion
The European Concept of Religion and the Idea of a Hindu
Nation
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