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.

The delicate relationship between religion and secular modernity is an exemplary element of 21st century societies: of their social and cultural ‘super-diversity’ caused by globalization. The many encounters and confrontations within and between groups and individuals refer to what has been coined as their social imaginaries. These are shared implicit sets of assumptions, often involving moral or religious claims about the society one is part of: claims about the values of society and about how it should be organized. Social imaginaries do not refer to explicit doctrines or beliefs but to the concrete and contingent way communities imagine their background assumptions and ideals. Hence, social imaginaries are ‘lived spaces’ in which people share as well as contest the meaning of their existence. The central research question of the project is: What can the concept of social imaginaries contribute to the analysis - in current cultural theory, religious studies and globalization theory - of societies that are interculturally super-diverse and display complex blends of existential frameworks, with both secular and religious features? Starting from this question the project will develop its research along theoretical and empirical lines, focusing on social imaginaries in urban and in virtual environments against the background of globalization. SIMAGINE will develop an international research consortium of ten relevant partners forming an interdisciplinary network, that aims for joint research and academic as well as public interventions and publications, for the organization of seminars and symposia, and for a larger fully elaborated application in 2019.

Children are often overlooked, which makes them vulnerable. This project explores the place of children in early Christianity. It does so by looking for child characters in the Gospel according to Luke and the Acts of the Apostles, and hopes in this way to study aims to shed new light on the lives of children in ancient times.