The Hagia Sophia—What’s Law Got to Do with It?


Dr. Mine Yildirim is Head of the Norwegian Helsinki Committee’s Freedom of Belief Initiative in Turkey

The hugely symbolic Hagia Sophia has regained its status as a mosque after nearly ninety years. In July 2020, the Turkish Council of State Tenth Chamber (the highest administrative court, and hereafter, the Council of State) annulled the 1934 Cabinet Decree making it a museum. The Hagia Sophia’s reinstatement as a mosque has aroused much attention to its political meaning and the nationalist religious sentiments around it—but what is the legal basis of the Council of State judgment? And what does it mean for religious freedom and the rule of law in Turkey?

(more…)

Continue Reading The Hagia Sophia—What’s Law Got to Do with It?

Conversation: Digitalization of Religion in Times of COVID-19


Marco Ventura is a professor with tenure in law and religion at the University of Siena and the Director of the Center for Religious Studies at Fondazione Bruno Kessler of Trento

Causing many religious activities to go online and resort to new information and communication technologies, the COVID-19 related lockdown and social distancing is transforming digital religion, a growing reality and research area for the last 20 years, into a mass experience. Quickly, the pre-pandemic niche experience and study is being replaced by a new reality and knowledge of digital religion, associated with controversies over conflicting interpretations of the process. Reacting to the transition into our pandemic-driven new age of digital religion, the four blogs gathered here contribute valuable information and present the many faces of the debate on how good or bad, digitalization of religion is (as well as on how actors should handle such momentous transformation).

In this attempt to briefly introduce the four texts and organize the extraordinary fluidity of digital religion in times of COVID-19, I would like to highlight four key elements of the reality, knowledge, and debate we are confronted with as we try to get ready for the new scenario.

(more…)

Continue Reading Conversation: Digitalization of Religion in Times of COVID-19

Prisoners of an Image Secularization as an Epidemic


Paolo Costa is a researcher at the Center for Religious Sciences of Fondazione Bruno Kessler in Trento, Italy.

The post was first published on the Bruno Kessler Foundation’s Center for Religious Studies’ website.

Photographing the Void

What will stay with us after the  COVID-19 pandemic is over is not only the bewilderment at a life change that no sane person could have foreseen only a few months ago or the collective anxiety for an indeterminate and insidious threat impending over mankind. Besides this,  some images have disturbed the consciences of those who, to evoke Max Weber, are still religiously musical despite the inexorable process of the disenchantment of the world.

Some of these images have already gone down in history.

The most evocative ones are the photographs of Pope Francis shot during the extraordinary Urbi et Orbi blessing of March 27. Overlooking a deserted and rain-lashed Saint Peter’s Square, he gave voice to the feeling of disorientation afflicting Christians and non-Christians alike since the beginning of the pandemic with these powerful words:

(more…)

Continue Reading Prisoners of an Image Secularization as an Epidemic