Walking Through Intolerance and Tolerance

Programme

What is tolerance? Does religious tolerance exist? What is the difference between religious tolerance and toleration? How has the concept of religious tolerance evolved over the centuries? What were the mechanisms used to promote intolerance or tolerance? Questions like these are very present in today’s life, in particular when analyzing the relationship between the so-called East and West, but were also very important throughout the centuries. Some historical figures made a stand for or against religious toleration. Religious and political movements developed in many places to promote one or the other. This workshop aims at exploring the concept of religious (in)tolerance, its different forms (tolerance vs. toleration), examples of both intolerance and tolerance over the centuries, in particular among Jews, Christians, and Muslims, and as well as how paths were envisaged for reaching a perfect stage of religious co-existence at different times and by various groups over the centuries.

Chairs

Ana Valdez, Yale University

Filomena Barros, University of Évora (CIDEHUS)

Reinhard Müller, University of Münster

Sessions

Cordoba 2015

This workshop welcomes papers for the following sessions: 1) a session dedicated to examples of religious texts that promoted intolerance and of historical figures who used them to support their arguments against tolerance; 2) a session dedicated to examples of religious texts that promoted tolerance (or toleration) and of historical figures who used them to support their arguments; 3) a session on the use of religious texts to justify both acts of tolerance and intolerance over the centuries; and 4) An additional session with invited speakers will investigate, as a case study, the topic of conversion in a comparative perspective, seeking to understand the relationship between conversion as a religious phenomenon and the question of religious tolerance or intolerance.

These sessions will be followed by a final fifth session also with invited speakers who will through the analysis of the papers presented at the conference, analyze and reevaluate the concept, developing, if possible, a new conceptual framework that will serve as the basis for further studies on this topic.