First meeting of a proposed research cluster:

Spirituality, Religion and the Arts

Date: Friday 26th April

Time: 10:30am - 12:30pm

Location: 70 Oxford St, room G.09

Just come along!

With special guests Dr Chihun Kim and Dr Ki Yoon Jang of Sogang University, Seoul

The arts—literature, performance, the visual arts, architecture, music, and others—have long had a productive but fractious relationship with religion and spirituality. Historically, they have been seen as tools for or threats to religious understandings of the human place in the world, or as ways of interrogating religious assumptions, patterns, taboos and practices. In recent centuries, the arts have also become an important site for theological reflection and spiritual exploration. As identification with traditional religious identities has become more complex or difficult for many, the arts have stepped in to fill that gap. As secularism grew, and now in a ‘post-secular’ age, the arts have an important role to play in offering spiritual experiences, building communities, and navigating interreligious tensions in ways that formal politics, at times, cannot.

All of this is to say that the overlap between spirituality, religion and the arts is a hugely productive site for interdisciplinary research. Anthropologists, literary scholars, sociologists, historians, linguists, art critics, theatre scholars, intellectual historians, and of course artists and writers themselves have an interest in the area, and a number of journals, conferences, and organisations have recently sprouted up to serve this need. It’s time that Manchester Metropolitan University had a research cluster in the area as well.

If your research touches on issues of religion, spirituality and the arts in the broadest sense, we want to hear from you.

For more information, or if you are interested but unable to attend, contact Josh Edelman at j.edelman@mmu.ac.uk

Including a free event the day before on Holy Ghosts: Hauntings Sacred and Profane. Book your ticket here.