The Changing Landscapes of Cross-Faith Places and Practices

Abstract

The present special issue of Entangled Religions has emerged from a conference about “Shared Sacred Places and Multi-Religious Space” that took place at the Leibniz Institute of European History (IEG) in Mainz in September 2016. As the title of the conference indicates, a main interest was to re-think the relation between place and space and between different religions. The conference took place in the framework of the IEG focus topic “Europe from the Margins,” which also included a lecture series on processes of marginalization and exclusion with regard to social and religious minorities within and beyond Europe. This background explains the range of topics in this special issue to a certain degree, because the conference had the aim to de-centre established notions of Europe and religion and understand them in their multi-dimensionality. While cross-faith practices are a worldwide phenomenon, the main geographical focus of the following articles is on southeastern Europe and the Mediterranean with their spatial extensions to Asia. Proceeding from here, the contributions in this volume understand multi-faith practices as embedded in local arrangements as well as in larger multi-religious landscapes, thus taking account of the interconnection between the local and the global and paying attention to the micro and macro levels of analysis.