Spaces of Tolerance: Changing Geographies and Philosophies of Religion in Today’s Europe

This book offers interdisciplinary and cross-national perspectives on the challenges of negotiating the contours of religious tolerance in Europe. In today’s Europe, religions and religious individuals are increasingly framed as both an internal and external security threat. This is evident in controls over the activities of foreign preachers but also, more broadly, in EU states’ management of migration flows, marked by questions regarding the religious background of migrating non-European Others. This book addresses such shifts directly by examining how understandings of religious freedom touch down in actual contexts, places and practices across Europe, offering multidisciplinary insights from leading thinkers in from political theory, political philosophy, anthropology and geography. The volume thus aims to ground ideal liberal democratic theory and, at the same time, to bring normative reflection to grounded, ethnographic analyses of religious practices. Such ‘grounded’ understandings matter, for they speak to how religions and religious difference are encountered in specific places. They especially matter in a European context where religion and religious difference are increasingly not just securitized but made the object of violent attacks. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of politics, geography, religious studies, and the sociology and anthropology of religion.