Open Access Journal: Entangled Religions: Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Religious Contact and Transfer

Entangled Religions (ER) is a peer reviewed online periodical that complements the book series “Dynamics in the History of Religions” (DHR) published with Brill. Entangled Religions is dedicated to channeling research on religious contact and transfer in past and present times into a single journal to open up innovative ways of conceptualizing the history of religions. It aims at contributing to a better understanding of the interdependence of religious traditions, of processes of religious transfer as well as of formally and semantically varying borders between religion and other societal fields.

The so-called world religions and other religious traditions are not, and have hardly ever been, homogeneous. Nor have they formed or evolved in isolation. The study of Religions, however, has been split into different fields for contingent reasons.This is a disadvantage especially with regard to topics relating to cross- and trans-religious processes whose research requires the joined expertise of different philologies and area studies.

Here, Entangled Religions offers common ground: It provides a platform which brings together scholars of various academic specializations – ranging from philologies to the social sciences – and incorporates historical as well as contemporary research.

With the objective of overcoming cultural stereotypes and their ideological abuse, the journal Entangled Religions focuses on the crucial role of mutual encounters for the origins, development and internal differentiation of religious traditions. We also examine interactions with other societal fields such as politics, economics, law, arts, medicine, and social care.

The studies published in ER are conducted in an interplay of theory-building and empirical studies, of object language and meta-language. ER aims at bridging academic meta-discourses on religion with religious discourses and religious self-descriptions. Thus, both scholarly theorizing disconnected from empirical data and atheoretical or naïve positivism can be avoided.

We set out to scrutinize interconnected processes of self-perception and perception by others, as well as phenomena of adaption and demarcation. Contributions to our journal examine how these phenomena become important factors in the historical dynamics of both the regional and the increasingly globalized religious fields, whose outer borders are constituted by both distinctions from and relations with other societal rationalities.

Presenting research on dynamics resulting from the interaction of idealtypically conceptualized religious traditions and their manifestations in the self-imagination of these traditions, the journal Entangled Religions creates systematic reference points which allow for the integration of diachronically and synchronically compared material into a general history of religions.

Vol 3 (2016)

Vol 2 (2015)

Vol 1 (2014)