Module description
Social crisis has often been linked to religious difference, but also to modern and contemporary approaches that seek to moderate religious diversity. This module focuses on conviviality, social crisis and questions raised by religious difference in a range of contexts:
- What are key concepts and narratives that shaped, and continue to shape, inter-religious relations in these contexts?
- How did economic, political and cultural dynamics contribute to both conviviality among religious communities and crisis?
- What are key political, social and intellectual approaches to the moderation and regulation of religious diversity? And how do religious communities engage with them, critically and creatively?
On the basis of these inquiries, students will be able to develop a nuanced understanding of various approaches to social crisis and religious difference as expressed in theoretical terms, political projects, narrative creativity, and everyday practice.
In 2025-26, the module will be taught with a focus on Jewish-Christian relations.
Assessment details
2000-word coursework essay
Educational aims & objectives
This module focuses on major political and intellectual approaches to religious diversity and social crisis from the early modern and modern periods to the contemporary world. It allows students:
- to examine important historical and contemporary settings, in which inter-religious relations are associated with productive negotiations or social crisis;
- to explore the political, economic, and cultural contexts that underpin everyday interactions and negotiations in multi-religious societies;
- to investigate key concepts and narratives that shaped, and continue to shape, e.g., Christian, Jewish, Islamic or secular interpretations of religious difference;
- to study major political frameworks that seek to address, moderate and regulate religious diversity in multi-religious societies;
- to acquire analytical tools for interrogating the concept of 'religious difference' itself, evaluating its merits and problematics, and exploring the intersections between religious, ethnic, national and cultural identifications.
Learning outcomes
Generic skills:
This module will enable students
- to engage competently and critically with primary texts and with research literature that relates them to their religious, political and cultural contexts;
- to discuss complex issues and arguments at the intersection of politics, society and religion in an informed and nuanced way;
- to develop and present coherent and persuasive arguments in oral and in written form.
Module specific skills:
- To identify core issues of inter-religious relations and social crisis in the early modern world, in colonial and post-colonial contexts, and in contemporary multi-religious societies.
- To understand how religious communities took up such issues and reshaped them on a conceptual and political level as well as in everyday life.
- To understand and discuss a range of political approaches to religious difference that seek to avert social crisis, but could also produce it (e.g. the millet system, the early modern ghetto, 'tolerance', the secular nation state).
- To develop tools for creative and responsible approaches to the challenges and promises of modern multi-religious societies.
Teaching pattern
2 hrs interactive lecture