Religion and poverty
- Submission status
- Closed
- Submission deadline
Poverty and religion are interrelated in different ways. On the one hand, for various religious traditions poverty is both an aspect of a particular faithful life (e.g. monastic communities) and giving to the poor is seen as a religious duty. Such traditions have evolved over time and expanded the role of faith-based organisations nowadays play in welfare provision and international development. Faith-based organizations play an important role in poverty alleviation both in rich and poor countries. These actions and practices, as well as their religious and theological underpinnings, deserve scrutiny. On the other hand, religion plays an important role in the life of people living in poverty: how they experience and shape their living, and how they find their place in society and the communities in which they. The role of religion in justifying certain inequalities and processes of exclusion (e.g. in India) and thus contributing to the sustainability of poverty is another important theme worth reflection.
We invite papers, from a range of disciplinary perspectives, that consider the following overarching question: how can religion be used as a vehicle to overcome structures of poverty, and how does it sometimes hinder such processes?
Contributions from sociology, development studies, religious studies, economics, theology, and other social sciences and humanities are welcomed; as are insights from different geographical settings, forms of poverty, and religious traditions.
This Collection is run in collaboration with the 2017 Salzburg Conference on Interdisciplinary Poverty Research, organised by the Centre for Ethics and Poverty Research of the University of Salzburg.
Editors
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Helmut P. Gaisbauer
Centre for Ethic and Poverty Research, University of Salzburg, Austria
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Gottfried Schweiger
University of Salzburg, Austria
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Clemens Sedmak
Department of Theology and Religious Studies, King's College London, UK/Centre for Ethics and Poverty Research, University of Salzburg, Austria
