Resilient Spirituality and the Challenge of Transformation

The open session will explore resilience with a focus of the relation of spirituality and religion. If resilience is considered as the ability to counteract or absorb a process of transformation and an ability to find what best suits new environmental conditions; and an awareness of how to cope with a crisis (EASR organizing committee), the question arises, how Spirituality, often understood in a personal, subjective and transformative sense, initiates or counteracts resilience in institutional religion. And how religion initiates or counteracts resilience in spirituality. Papers of this session will look into the challenge of transformation on both sides and analyze how spirituality contributes to resilient forms of life-way-navigation in a world of culture and tradition, but also cross culture, pluralism, interfaith and multiple faith identities and change.

Martin Rötting: martin.roetting@sbg.ac.at