Scandinavian Network for Research in the Study of Religion
The network brings together researchers in the study of religion affiliated with universities and professional communities in Denmark, Sweden and Norway.
Left to right: Confucius statue (China), Artemis of Ephesus (Turkey), Vishnu (Thailand) and the Black Nazarene (Philippines). Photo: Cecilie Endresen
The network gathers researchers who apply approaches from the study of religionin different fields and take the critical and comparative dimension of the discipline seriously.
The Study of Religion
The study of religion is an academic discipline with a humanistic, comparative and global perspective on religion. The discipline has long traditions in faculties of humanities in Scandinavia, and Scandinavian scholars in the field assert themselves internationally.
The study of religion researchers study religions in the past and present in an academic, critical and cross-cultural perspecive. Religion is analysed as something man-made, as part of society and culture.
Research within the study of religion combines various theories and methods from the humanities and social sciences. The network intends to strengthen the discipline’s comparative core and consider the internal interdisciplinarity and empirical range an academic asset.
International cooperation
The mythical serpent Naga in a Thai Buddhist presentation of the milk churning myth, at the airport in Bangkok. Photo: Cecilie Endresen
The network is also linked to various national fora such as the Norwegian Association for the History of Religions (easr.eu). The network is intended to support and a supplement to the different national associations representing the discipline with which the members collaborate.
The network originated in the good, long-standing collaboration at Scandinavian level, such as in the peer-reviewed journal CHAOS – the Scandinavian journal of studies of the history of religions – and the annual CHAOS seminar.
The members actively contribute to internationally leading journals devoted to the scholarly and comparative study of religion, such as Religion (tandfonline.com) and Numen (brill.com) - International Review for the History of Religions.
The affiliated researchers also publish in a number of other high-level academic journals.
Dissemination
The members of the network disseminate nuanced and research-based knowledge in the media, textbooks, encyclopedias and reference books. An example of collaboration around research-based dissemination is the award-winning Religion Oracles (religionsoraklene.no, in Norwegian). Researchers within the study of religion also contribute with academic knowledge to the civil service.
The network wishes to help preserve Norwegian, Danish and Swedish as living academic languages, among other things because of the discipline’s association with the school system, and to contribute to a knowledge-based public debate.
Teaching
By facilitating research collaborations that strengthen the discipline’s comparative core, the network seeks to strengthen the study of religion at Scandinavian universities and expand the good collaboration that is already taking place.
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