Refugees and Religious Tolerance in Europe: Plurality of Perspectives

On 21 April, research project NoVaMigra organises a webinar on the topic of the interconnectedness of religion and refugees in Europe. The webinar includes presentations by Prof. Birgit Meyer, Prof. Martha Frederiks, and Dr Christoph Baumgartner (all Philosophy and Religious Studies).

The webinar

Religion took center stage as refugees and asylum seekers started arriving in Europe in the summer of 2015. In the increasingly secularized Europe, religion, paradoxically, has gained or regained significance in many policy and public debates. These debates often focused on the perceived incompatibility of the cultural and religious characteristics of the arriving refugees with European norms and values. 

In this webinar, anthropologists from Adam Mickiewicz University (Izabella Main, Elżbieta M. Goździak, and Izabela Kujawa) and scholars of religious studies from Utrecht University (Meyer, Frederiks, and Baumgartner) will share their research and ideas on the debates on refugee reception — debates which often frame Islam as a threat to the perceived identity of Europe as a Christian continent. The anti-refugee stance of many governments will be juxtaposed with contestations of populist attitudes towards refugees and with activities undertaken to ‘welcome the stranger’ by civil society actors in Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands, and Turkey.