Research Platform “Cultures – Religions – Identities: Areas of Tension and Interactions”

Development plan of the Faculty of Catholic Theology of the University of Salzburg for 2012-2015:

As an inspiration for the wisdom and transmission of the good life, as a source of ethical orientation and as a potential for social and solidarity-based action, religions represent important resources for the formation of identity in society.The current scientific-theological debate is sensitized to social, cultural, political and religious virulences in society, as the areas of tension in earlier epochs were overlooked, concealed or even suppressed. Efforts at secularization and autonomy were pushed back by an identification of culture and religion as well as by a political instrumentalization of religion.A qualified, (self-)critical, and pluralistic approach to theological reflection is most likely to engage with the aforementioned areas of tension, upheaval, and difference. Such a discourse is to be implemented and further developed in the coming years in the research platform “Cultures – Religions – Identities: Areas of Tension and Interactions”. He consciously distances himself from functionalist interpretations of society as well as from a fundamentalist reduction of reality.In addition, the new research platform is an effective catalyst for the broadening of the previous specialization, which was realized by the Center “Theology Intercultural and the Study of Religions” in 2006 (in continuation of the institute founded in 2001).