“East-West Encounters and Religious Change in Modernizing East Asia”

Call for Papers

Date: July 27-28, 2019

Venue: Hokkaido University, Sapporo, Japan

Abstract Submission Deadline: January 31, 2019

East Asia has undergone globalization and modernization in the last five hundred years. The first encounter between East Asia and the modernizing West was with the Jesuit missionaries in the late 16th century in China, Korea, and Japan, where their inculturation strategy succeeded in attracting some countries began to realize the uniqueness of the institutional religion of Catholicism in contrast to the local customary religiosities originated from suppressed in East Asia until the mid-19thcentury,

In short, East Asia has varieties of religious institutions and communities, folk religions and new religions, and atheism and other secularisms. The research on religion in East Asia needs historical, sociological, political, and other perspectives. While all topics on religion are welcome at the conference, we especially invite papers that address one or more of the following research questions:

– How did religions and their practitioners in the Global East encounter and respond to Christianity backed by western modernity and hegemonic power in recent centuries?
– How were the concepts of the boundary between religion and secularity, administrative control of religions in authoritative regimes and the policy of religious pluralism formed in the Global East?
– What kind of similarity and difference in traditional and new religions are there in the Global East?
– How has secularization proceeded in the Global East and manifested in the growth of religious “nones” and in the new forms of “believing without belonging” and “belonging without believing”?

Conference Website: https://www.easssr2019.org/