The return of the religious?

Islam, Christianity, Judaism – how important is the role they play for us and for politics? Which of the two shapes our values and norms more, religion or politics? Is there a “return of the gods” – that is, is the world growing more religious? The humanists of the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” in Münster provide answers to these and to other questions, because religion and politics have interacted, borrowed each other’s symbols and legitimised practices in all of the world’s cultures.

The Cluster’s four thematic pillars are: “normativity”, investigating which norms and social orders have developed in what way; “staging”, dealing with the patterns of religious and political rites; “integrative procedures”, exploring religious and political ways of integration; and “violence”, researching when, how and with which justification religions exert violence. The Münster academics publicly speak in many events, they make their research visible and facilitate the general appreciation of a topic that is thousands of years old and that is as current and as relevant now as hardly ever before.