What does it mean that someone is rich? Or poor? Religious answers to such questions, especially those relating to divine election, largely impact society as they (co-)determine how people evaluate wealth and poverty and related issues. Though widely popular, these religious beliefs have not yet been systematically explored, compared, and evaluated in light of their societal implications. To fill that hiatus in the current state of research, this project addresses the following research question: How can contemporary Christian beliefs relating divine election to wealth and poverty be evaluated critically in light of their potential societal implications?

Salafi Qur’an interpretations are widely known and distrusted as radical. For societal discussions on Salafism it is therefore important to analyze the roots, growth and dissemination of these interpretations. This project will do so through an in-depth study of the commentary of the Damascene Salafi scholar al-Qasimi (d. 1914 CE).

In post-9/11 Western societies and academic debates, the notion that religion and women?s emancipation are fundamentally conflicting has regained plausibility. Consequently, women?s deliberate religious conversions are a pertinent academic, religious and socio-political issue. In face of this religion/emancipation paradox, this research project will apply interdisciplinary methods to study women?s processes of conversion as the acquisition of new religious subjectivities in which gender and sexuality play a formative role. The project hypothesises that gender equality and women?s sexuality are ?battlefields? on which converting women negotiate their position and subjectivity. It assumes that the conversion process is notably acted out in the context of public debates and religious prescriptions that highlight women?s positions and sexualities in adversative directions. By studying female conversion as an ongoing and multi-layered negotiation between secular and religious gender discourses, the project develops an innovative model of interpretation, based on a diversification of notions of choice, embodiment and religion. Its operationalisation takes place through three subprojects: a qualitative empirical PhD research on women?s embodied conversion processes in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam; a postdoctoral cultural analysis of British, Dutch and Flemish public debates on controversies about traditional religious groups, gender and sexuality; and a postdoctoral religious studies approach investigating women?s positions and practices as narrated and regulated within Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions. This comparative interdisciplinary project will contribute substantially to the public and academic understandings of tensions between religious and secular gender discourses through in-depth analysis of the experiences of women positioned at the intersection of both.