Call for papers

BABEL (Belgian Association for the Study of Religions)

and the Ruusbroec Institute, Faculty of Arts, University of Antwerp

Invite abstracts for the conference “The Role of Religion in Trauma, Vulnerability, and Resilience”, which will take place at the University of Antwerp on 26 and 27 January 2023

The study of trauma, vulnerability, and resilience has become increasingly prevalent in scholarly research. In the recent and current contexts of global pandemic and conflict, these topics continue to be as relevant as ever. Although often primarily associated with psychology and psychiatry, over the past several years, these subjects have become prominent in many other fields, including theology and religious studies.

Broadly speaking, trauma relates to an experience of overwhelming suffering that leaves the victim with the sense of hopelessness and helplessness, and which has profound deleterious effects on their life. Religious institutions, doctrines, discourses, practices, and norms can provide consolation and support the meaning-making process and the process of healing in such situations, but they can also lie at the root of traumatization and hinder recovery and resilience.

Judith Butler has described vulnerability as an ontological dimension of human life due to our irrevocably embodied existence.[1] At the same time, as she has written more recently, vulnerability can be “a potentially effective mobilizing force,”[2] that enables the oppressed to unite in resisting their oppression. The subject of vulnerability is receiving increasing attention in theology and religious studies, as is evident from several recent publications.[3] How might religious perspectives on the origins and purposes of life, embodiment, pain, suffering, oppression, and resistance shape our understanding of these phenomena?

Whether resilience is categorized as a process, an outcome, an individual trait, or all three, the construction of resilience is the result of complex processes that depend on various individual, collective, and contextual factors. Scholars in the field of psychology of religion have argued that religion makes an important contribution to constructing resilience insofar as it helps people to withstand the most threatening experiences by fostering the search for meaning, providing emotional comfort, creating social interconnectedness, and establishing and reinforcing the relationship with the sacred.

We invite abstracts for short, 20-minute paper presentations or proposals for panels of three short papers that explore any or all of these themes and from the perspective of religious or theological history, psychology of religion, anthropology or religion, practical and empirical theology, ethics, the study of authoritative texts, systematic theology, comparative perspectives, etc.

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words to john.arblaster@uantwerpen.be no later than 30 September 2022.

Keynote speakers:

 Dominik Markl, Pontifical Biblical Institute

Tine Van Osselaer, University of Antwerp

Srdjan Sremac, Free University of Amsterdam

[1] Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 128-149.

[2] Judith Butler, “Rethinking Vulnerability and Resistance,” in Vulnerability in Resistance, ed. Judith Butler, Zeynep Gambetti, and Leticia Sabsay (Durham: Durham University Press, 2016), 12-27.

[3] E.g. Roberto Sirvent, Embracing Vulnerability: Human and Divine (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2014); Sturla J. Stlsett, “Towards a Political Theology of Vulnerability Anthropological and Theological Propositions,” Political Theology 16 (2015) 464-478; Susie Paulik Babka, Through the Dark Field: The Incarnation through an Aesthetics of Vulnerability (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2017).