The Religious History and Heritage research group is part of the VU School of Religion and Theology, which is now part of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities (FSH).
Our core mission is to understand how varieties of religion and religious expression took shape in the past, and what this layered and complicated past means for the present. We study material and immaterial religious culture, religious ideas and institutions, and the economic, colonial and political worlds that religious communities helped to shape and were shaped by. One question runs through much of our work. How have narratives about the religious past been used, and how are they still used, to form individual and group identities?
To answer that question we draw on a wide range of sources. These include the archives of religious groups and institutions, of local, provincial and national governments, and of charitable organizations. They include material culture, such as clothing, ritual objects and everyday items, as well as theological, polemical and economic writing. We also study sites of cultural and landscape heritage, such as buildings, parks and other places, for what they tell us about religion, religiosity and identity in the past and in contemporary society.
The group contributes to public and academic debates on the preservation of and care for religious heritage, migration, colonialism and its legacies, antisemitism, the relationship between religion and economic life, and the changing place of religion in an increasingly secular society. We work with scholars, students, religious communities, policymakers and people in the cultural heritage sector who want to understand the role of religion in society today.