Interfaith dialogue cooperation with the Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies

With the objective of serving as a mutual learning platform to contrast and compare experiences on the management of religion and public piety, as well as to (re)discover the common challenges faced by the governments and societies in Europe and Indonesia, the ICRS requested the EU Delegation Political Section to organize an International Conference entitled “Religion and Public Piety: Comparing European and Indonesian Experiences”.

The ICRS is a consortium of three universities (UGM, State Islamic University Sunan Kalijaga – UIN, and Duta Wacana Christian University- UKDW) offering the only Ph.D. programme in inter-religious studies, with a strong vocation for comparatives studies with religious movements in other parts of the world .

The event was held on the 27th and 28th October 2015 at UGM in Jogjkarta. The conference was followed by a back-to-back meeting discussing a multi-year collaborative research agenda. Funding was mainly derived from the European Union with additional contributions from Globethics.net and ICRS.

On the first day of the Conference, around 130 participants, excluding the organisers and Committee members, attend the event and on the second day, there were 100 participants in the last plenary session. As planned, for the back-to-back meeting there were 30 invitees, who took part. Fortunately, the event was graced by the participation of the Austrian Ambassador, H.E. Andreas Karabaczek, who gave an introductory remark.

In addition to the primary objective (serve as a mutual learning platform to contrast and compare experiences on the management of religion and public piety), the conference focused on the discussion of the following sub-themes:

  1. Religion and citizenship
  2. Managing religious diversity in a polarised society
  3. Religion, Freedom of Expression and the Politics of Human Rights
  4. Interfaith Leadership, Education and Training
Published On: October 27, 2015|