UCSIA Summer School 2022

28 August – 3 September 2022

UCSIA Summer School participants 2022 - © Frederik Hulstaert & UCSIA vzw

theme

Religion, Mobility and Economics

Mobility has long defined religious traditions and their vital presence in our contemporary world. The 2022 programme focussed on ‘Religion, Mobility & Economy’, the diversity of religions on the move and economic transformation.

(1) What defines a religion and its boundaries? When religions are on the move, where do we locate its forms and expressions (e.g. its theological contents or its material elements)? What characterizes religious transformations like conversions, revivals, or disavowals of religion?

(2) What is the relationship between religious mobility and economic transformation? What institutions, secular and spiritual alike, shape the migration and circulation of religions? How do the sacred geographies associated with traditions intersect with neoliberalism, marketization, and globalization?

(3) What are the global, transnational, and transregional aspects of religion? How do flows of capital and labour, as well as older routes of trade, shape religious growth and decline? What influences do these flows have on religious beliefs and practices? What histories of colonialism and/or socialism impact the ways religions disseminate and relocate?

(4) How does theology engage economic transformations? Do religious responses matter in times of economic growth? Or are they relevant only in times of crisis? What theological reflections accompany the crises of mobility in the (post-)pandemic period?

Faculty

Jayeel Serrano Cornelio is Associate Professor and Director of the Development Studies Program at the Ateneo de Manila University.

David Henig is Associate Professor at the Department of Cultural Anthropology, Utrecht University.

Angie Heo is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Sociology of Religion at Divinity School, University of Chicago.

Jayeel Cornelio

David Henig

Angie Heo

Public lecture – Missionaries and Refugees: Figures of Religion and Mobility from the Divided Koreas

In the past year, the Russia-Ukraine war resulted in the violent displacement of millions in search of asylum in neighboring countries. By violating Ukraine’s territorial borders, the Russian invasion invoked the prospect of a new Cold War threatening to divide Europe. For scholars of religion, the war has also prompted critical reflection on the various ways religion creates borders and enables movement in times of crisis and division.

In this talk, professor Angie Heo (University of Chicago, Divinity School) turned to the divided Koreas where missionaries and refugees feature as figures of mobility in a unique, geopolitical zone where the old Cold War never really ended. She considered controversial questions raised by South Korean missionaries to the North, namely mainline ecumenists and conservative evangelicals, around the nature of religious freedom and faith: Are the churches in North Korea “real” or “fake”? Is it possible for communists to be Christians?

Extending these debates to North Korean refugees to the South, she further considered the implications of equating refugees to “defectors” in religious and political circles alike. What norms of freedom and citizenship are entailed in moral ideologies of crossing into South Korea? Does an authentic religious conversion require political defection, and for whom? By tracing these entwined discourses of mission and asylum, she examined how contending notions of conversion are at play in the Cold War politics of religion and mobility.