Archives Religion and territory > 2012 Presentation

The international conference Religion and Territory is jointly organized by the Eurel network of sociologists and legal scholars of religion (www.eurel.info, led by the research centre PRISME-SDRE UMR 7012, CNRS - University of Strasbourg and GSRL, Paris), and CRESC (Center for Research on Socio-Cultural Change).

The empirical and quantitative study of religious geography is a new subject with much opportunity with the continual development of technical and conceptual tools. Following the ‘spatial turn’, we have much to learn about the spatial mechanisms of religious change. Although significant progress has been made in the wider field of religious geography, there is considerable scope for further research into the spatial analysis of religious data using formal methods: a new and promising field.

Equally, the growing religious diversity of Europe has provided social and institutional challenges. Responses have differed greatly both across Europe and between different levels of government within countries. Bioethics, the position of religious minorities, faith schools and religious education, the separation of church and state, religious involvement in the public sphere, and responses to extremism are all areas where legal institutions, political interests and public attitudes interact in important ways, and differently so across space and institutional and national boundaries.

This suggests an important role for legal scholars, sociologists and geographers to engage in empirically-based discussion of religious change.

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