Speaker
Description
In the past 20 years, Interreligious Studies (IRS), as an academic field of study, has grown rapidly, and its proponents/ practitioners are still engaged in debating its object(s) of study, approaches and other aspects. In some understandings of the field, IRS is conceived as going beyond an academic enterprise, but also aspiring to interreligious engagement, with its more normative objective of attempting better relations between different religious groups.
My presentation will focus on such an attempt at developing interreligious studies and engagement in Indonesia, more specifically in the city of Yogyakarta, by the Indonesian Consortium for Religious Studies (ICRS), which was established two decades ago. It started as a form of interreligious dialogue between lecturers in academic settings and was later institutionalized by its member universities. My presentation will look mostly at the ideas underlying it and its challenges, and discuss how the Consortium’s experience may contribute theoretically to the global discourse of interreligious studies and engagement.