Projects

This project seeks to rethink the history of modern Chinese thought by providing the first ever study of the academic discipline of U+201Cethnic minority philosophiesU+201D in the PeopleU+2019s Republic of China. It will focus on the much neglected relation between the imported categories of U+201CphilosophyU+201D and U+201CreligionU+201D and conceptions of ethnicity in twentieth-century and contemporary Chinese thought. The field of ethnic ...

This project examines the role of written records in the construction of religious knowledge in ancient Greece. Traditionally, Greek religion has been understood as an action-orientated religion based on oral tradition, in which writing was only of significance in so-called U+2018marginalU+2019 and U+2018magicalU+2019 practices like Orphism and curse-writing. This project challenges such a portrayal by uncovering the varied spaces and ...

Since the 19th century, religious and national identities (seemingly) are in opposition to one another; whereas the latter seen as a sign of modernity, religious identity is dismissed as pre-modern. In reality, however, national and religious identities co-exist, often in symbiosis. This was also the case in ‘unmodern’ Russia, where the exclusive identification of Orthodoxy with Russia, as opposed to ‘Polish’ Catholicism and ‘Ukrainian’ ...

How has race shaped the academic study of religion in “the West”? My study investigates how efforts to establish “religion” as an autonomous, unique category and realm of study were grounded in and legitimated by what I call a racialized project of distinction. I hypothesize that 1) late 19th cen. European and mid-20th cen. US attempts to conceptualize “religion” relied on the desire and effort to draw rigid distinctions—i.e. sacred/profane, ...

The later Schelling and Nietzsche developed unique and influential perspectives on the nature and function of religion. For certain reasons (developed below), often these perspectives have not only been viewed separately from their historical ancestry, but no heed has been given to a potential philosophical connection between them. The purpose of this project is then to re-contextualize the later Schelling and Nietzsche as post-Hegelian ...

Drawing on recent developments in continental philosophy, this project stages a methodological confrontation between queer theory and the phenomenology of religion to reinvigorate the latter as a critical method for the study of religion capable of accommodating all forms of empirical difference. To that end, it provides a queer critique of contemporary continental philosophy of religion by diagnosing and interrogating the implicit ...

The interfaculty centre KADOC-KU Leuven (°1976)
documents and studies the manifold cultural and societal
legacies of religion in modern society. The corner stone of
its digital research infrastructure is the web database ODIS.
Since 2000 it centralizes and discloses authoritative, thus
source-validated and research-embedded data-series on
the history and heritage of civil society. In May 2021
KADOC-ODIS was ...