The CESAR Conference 2024: The Religion in Transformation: Changing the Conditions of (and by) Religiosity conference, hosted by CEU and organised by Gulrano Ataeva and Karsten Schuil together with the organizing team of CESAR, took place from Friday, October 4 to Sunday, October 6, at CEU campus and Vienna's Weltmuseum.
CESAR is a network that embodies the collective effort of seven universities in Central Europe: The Central European University from Austria, the Comenius University from Slovakia, the Pardubice-, Charles-, and Masaryk Universities from Czechia, and the Eötvös Loránd University, and the University of Szeged from Hungary. The network organises every year a graduate conference that provides the opportunity for early career researchers to come together, present their research, set-up new collaborations, and expand their networks.
After introductions by Karsten Schuil, István Perczel, and Attila Miklovicz (the president of the Philosophy Department of DOSZFiTO). Professor Tijana Krstic's keynote discussed confessions and caliphs, genealogies and geographies, and legitimate sovereignty. She argued that Sunnism and Shiism were defined during the early modern period, articulating the orthodoxy and creating the basis for today's theological differences. In the next session chaired by CEU alumni Martin Pjecha, our former MA Davide Politi presented on demonic magic in a panel on Historical Approaches to Transformation, whilst a concurrent panel chaired by keynote lecture Professor Massimo Introvigne discussed Changing Social Discourse about New Religiosity. Session two of the first day had panels on the Anthropology of Transformation in Religion chaired by CEU Professor Vlad Naumescu and Technological Innovation in the Age of Digitalization chaired by CEU Professor Carsten L. Wilke.
Day two of the conference opened with panels on Concepts of Temporality in Medieval Christianity and New Approaches in the Study of Contemporary Religious Experience. These were chaired by Prof. Emeritus Gábor Klaniczay and Prof. István Perczel, and included papers by our current MA Emily Moore (Chronos and Kairos Time in Benedictine Practice), and former MA Tinatin Mirianashvli (Thirteenth-century Academic Condemnations at the University of Paris). This was followed by a keynote discussion on the Post-Abe-Assassination Crisis in Japan and the Request for Dissolution of the Unification Church. Peter Zoehrer talked about conflict between the Unification Church and the communists of Japan; Prof. Dr. Massimo Introvigne provided a historic overview of why the crisis occured, finding its roots in early modern Japanese attitudes to the emperor and, much further back, the Roman Empire; and Rosita Šorytė talked about the loss of freedoms in Japan.
In the penultimate panel, entitled Postcolonial & Extraeuropean Contributions and chaired by CEU Professor Nadia Al-Bagdadi, Rabia Umay Can, a Ph.D. Candidate at the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology presented her findings from her fieldwork on Cultivating an Islamic Self: Pursuit of Salvation from Imitative Faith to Authentic Faith while the concurrent panel Mixing Locality and Alocality in Religion, explored themes as diverse as ancient theater, post-Soviet Georgia, and experiences of Buddism. The final panel explored religion in national identity, and conceptual approaches to the study of religion, ending with a study of the adoption and adaptation of Christian terms in far-eastern languages. The last day was concluded with a guided tour of the European Qur'an exhibition at Weltmuseum and a feedback session with the conference participants at CEU.
The conference was supported by CEU's Center for Religious Studies and ACRO fund, and the Philosophy Department Association of Hungarian PhD and DLA candidates, on behalf of the Ministry of Human Resources, with the support of the National Talent Program, announced by the National Culture Fund of Hungary.