In our increasingly pluralistic societies and rapidly globalising world, the Faculty of Religion and Theology at VU Amsterdam aims to create an interdisciplinary, interculturally, and interreligious research environment, continuously engaged in dialogue.
Some teams are more permanent, others are project-based. All Research Teams aspire to be places where senior and junior researchers, alike, meet and discuss each other’s work. Research Teams present also an opportunity to work together on joint and individual publications, grant applications and valorization projects. We stimulate critical reflection, mutual enrichment and dialogue between different (non-)religious traditions, research approaches, and disciplines.
The Research Teams provide our researchers with the opportunity to:
They also provide our PhD and (Research) Master students, and colleagues from partner institutions with opportunities to participate in the academic discourse and to find their own place within the field of their expertise. As a faculty, our strategic goals are academic excellence, societal relevance, and (religious) commitment. By bundling our strengths intelligently, the Research Teams boost the pursuit of those goals.
The foci of our Research Teams vary from specific (confessional) traditions, and dialogue between traditions, to the investigation and facilitation of the interaction between religion and society at large. Most teams approach their theme from a range of disciplines, whether literary, historical, systematic, or empirical. The foci of our Research Teams can be described around three fundamental core themes: