Welcome to CREOR

After two initial meetings, cooperation between the Faculties of Religious Studies of these universities has been intensified on the basis of common research projects, colloquia and publications as well as a joint bilingual seminar for graduate students, which has now been held two till four times a year starting in September 2005 and called the “Montreal Biblical Colloquium”.

A feature event of the Colloquium has been the lecture series on “Women in Antiquity” in 2018-2019: With as speakers: Bernadette Brooten (Brandeis), Naftali Cohn (Concordia), Carly Daniel-Hughes (Concordia), Bill Gladhill (McGill), Patricia Kirkpatrick (McGill),  Lynn Kozak (McGill), Ross Kraemer (Brown), Anne Letourneau (UdM), Gerbern Oegema (McGill), Martin Seeger (Leeds), and Heidi Wendt (McGill).Add a description about this item

Several faculty and graduate student members cooperate in the Cambridge, MA, based Contexticon project: an interactive laboratory for exploring how the words used by the New Testament authors were understood by audiences of their day, offering unprecedented tools for fresh  readings of the long-venerated biblical texts, serving scholars,  pastors, and general readers.

Quebec and Canada are built upon cultural pluralism, which includes religious pluralism, and is part of its identity. To preserve this model for society, much research into the positive and negative effects of religious pluralism is needed.

In recent scholarly discourse there are many different ways of thinking about religious diversity - such as that offered by Charles Taylor - as the “solution” to multicultural society’s problems. 

However, religious diversity is more and more problematized in political and public discourses around the world, with secularism or laïcité posited as the new solution to the challenge of fostering social cohesion in multicultural environments. This categorization of secularism as solution ultimately places religion in the category of problem. 

In recent years violence is often seen as inherent to religious practices and beliefs. This association has affected some religions more than others; Islam, in particular, is increasingly defined in public discourse by its relationship to international terrorism, such that the term fundamentalism is now often used exclusively to refer to Islamic fundamentalism.  

 While some scholars, such as William Cavanaugh, insist that drawing a distinction between secular and religious violence is unhelpful and should be avoided, the so-called myth of religious violence - the idea that religion causes violence - has become commonplace in the contemporary world.  

While scripture remains the starting point for many investigations into the relationship between religion and violence, there exists a gap between historians, literary scholars, and social scientists. The 2018 colloquium has impressively uncovered the vulnerability of young people across the world’s main religions searching for identity to groups promoting violence and mixing it with ideological and religious messages.  

Young people seem to be equally or more interested in religion and spirituality. Compared to their parents, however,  they mostly have not received any education or support in it. There are few places for them to go to receive answers to their existential problems, nor do they have the same tight knit communities than before.

In a recent Angus Reid poll young women overall scored slightly higher than young men in terms of interest and involvement in religion and spirituality, and interestingly the belief in hell had even gone up among young people.  

When designing a society for the future, it is important to listen to what young people have to say and what is important for them: authenticity, spirituality, indigenous traditions, care for the climate.

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