[First posted in AWOL 16 March 2020, updated 15 February 2022]
Entangled Religions: Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Religious Contact and Transfer
ISSN: 2363-6696
Entangled Religions is an interdisciplinary, peer-reviewed academic journal. It deals with encounters between different religious traditions and concomitant processes of transfer in past and present times.
Contributions to Entangled Religions discuss occasions, themes, modes, conditions, and consequences of contacts between religious groups and the way religious thought and practice developed in and through such contact phenomena. Such phenomena, we assume, eventually brought about both the larger and smaller religious traditions of today and the religious field as a social entity distinct from other fields such as politics, economics, and art.
The journal aims at overcoming the historically established disciplinary cleavages in religious studies by providing a common point of departure. Inter- and intra-religious processes initiated by religious encounter are a focal point of research on religion, enabling researchers from various academic backgrounds to share their respective research. Presenting research on dynamics resulting from the interaction of distinct religious traditions and their manifestations in the self-imagination of these traditions, Entangled Religions creates systematic reference points which allow for the integration of diachronically and synchronically compared material into a general history of religions.
Entangled Religions focuses on case studies of original research, with each case study focusing on a particular geographical region, a particular moment in or period of time, and a particular constellation of two or more religious traditions encountering each other. Each case study extrapolates the occasions as well as the historical and social contexts of such encounters and, most importantly, sheds light on the issues, notions, themes and practices addressed in the particular contact situation.
While individual case studies and the particularities of the presented material are crucial, the broader objective of Entangled Religions is to enable larger-scale comparisons. Comparing diverse cases beyond individual particularities, time periods, and cultural contexts requires abstracting from the material at hand and making broader generalizations. We believe this is best done by using theoretical concepts that function as tertia comparationis, making every case study in Entangled Religions a case of something. For example, a case study about transformations of Jewish rituals in ancient Palestine due to contact with Christian communities is comparable with another case study about polemics on Catholic food prohibitions among contemporary Lebanese Sunnis only if both case studies refer to and draw from a common theoretical concept, such as “purity”.
Authors are thus expected to use analytical concepts to substantiate their case studies. Examples include the analytical concepts discussed on our website. Authors are strongly encouraged to engage with and present their material in light of these, or to introduce other analytical concepts as long as comparability of their case studies is ensured.
Entangled Religions is published by the Center for Religious Studies and the Käte Hamburger Kolleg "Dynamics in the History of Religions between Asia and Europe" at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. The website is hosted by the University Library of Ruhr-Universität Bochum.
Vol. 12 No. 2: The Desert Origins of God: Yahweh's Emergence and Early History in the Southern Levant and Northern Arabia
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