In the face of the recent upsurge of anti-Semitism, Islamophobia and other forms of prejudice, how can we support young people in building their resilience against hostile voices?

The Open University’s RETOPEA (‘Religious Toleration and Peace’) project team is collaborating with colleagues from the ‘Understanding the Interplay: Worldviews, Education & Lived Citizenship’ project (Universities of London South Bank University and UCL) and  HFL Education to offer a free joint workshop on the 24^th of June 2025 at Walton Hall in Milton Keynes. This  will explore ‘Creative pedagogies for promoting religious tolerance and diversity in schools’, including the use of filmmaking and Lego.

This workshop is aimed at head teachers and educational leaders in secondary education, further education and sixth forms as well as at teachers in history, film and media studies, or religious, worldviews and civic education. The workshop is offered free of charge, with financial support from the Culham St Gabriels Trust.

The RETOPEA project aims to support young people’s active learning about religious diversity in the past and present through the creative process of making short documentary-style films (‘docutubes’).​ RETOPEA ​is an international project originally funded by the EU’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme (2018-22; Grant Agreement no. 770309). Its educational methods and resources have been piloted across Europe with young people (aged 12-18). From 2023 onwards, further funding from the Culham St. Gabriel’s Trust and The Open University’s Open Societal Challenges programme has allowed the team to test and evaluate RETOPEA resources and methods more extensively in Jordan, Albania and the UK, and the team are currently also exploring their use in primary and home education.

The RETOPEA team have developed a free online course on Young people and religion: creative learning with history, which is available on OpenLearn. This explains how teachers and youth workers can use the ‘docutube method’ in their own teaching. Participants will receive a free statement of participation upon completion.

The team would like to hear from teachers, educational leaders and schools interested in using the docutube method and RETOPEA resources.

To get in touch, find out more about RETOPEA or book your place at the workshop in Milton Keynes on the 24^th of June, ​​contact: RETOPEA@open.ac.uk, including details of your school, job title and roles held.

By Suzanne Newcombe and Stephen Christopher

The Religious Studies Department at the Open University is excited to be the lead partner on a new grant from the John Templeton Foundation entitled ‘New Religiosity and the Digital Study of Eudaimonia’ (No. 63357), which runs from 2025-2027.

This project will establish an infrastructure that will allow researchers to explore how contemporary religion might promote or hinder well-being. Eudaimonia is a Greek word commonly translated as happiness or welfare. The concept is closely associated with questions of how to live a ‘good’, meaningful, and satisfying life. This was a major consideration of Aristotle’s practical philosophy. Traditionally, religious frameworks aim to provide the beliefs and social structures of providing just such a ‘good life’.

Using the infrastructure of the Database of Religious History at the University of British Columbia in Canada, the project will design a new data entry framework (a ‘poll’) to capture group-level descriptive variables that is fit-for-purpose to capture beliefs and practices in contemporary religious movements.

The ‘New Religiosity Poll’ will incorporate both narrative (qualitative) as well as closed questions which lend themselves to statistical analysis (quantitative). By establishing this data entry structure, we will be able to bring the study of contemporary religious movements into dialogue with the rapidly expanding field of the digital humanities and expanding computing power.

The project will have a particular focus on variables which are associated with human flourishing and well-being.  These questions are likely to relate to things like gratitude, dietary restrictions restricting alcohol or tobacco use, nature of social support networks or encouragement to volunteer for causes within and beyond the structure of the religious movement itself.

Cambridge Central Mosque’s atrium (Cmglee, CC BY-SA 4.0)

We will also look at variables relating to how and to what extent a religious group is accepted by mainstream society in a particular national context or by the greater mainstream tradition to which it claims to be associated. We will also include information on beliefs and practices that might have a negative effect on wellbeing of some people, such as questions about the treatment of former members and the corporal punishment of children.

Svetoary community celebrating Mokosh (Union of Slavic Rodnover Communities, CC BY-SA 4.0)

After we establish this framework, we will enter 400 movements into the new database structure. Half of these entries will be organised by the partner organisation Inform, based in Theology and Religious Studies at King’s College London and half will be commissioned by Dr. Christopher with a focus on engaging scholars and trained expert-insiders from Asia and Africa. Our selection criteria for these groups will capture five broad traditions which have a significant presence from the 1970s onwards and have engaged with rapidly changing media technologies and the increasingly global flows of information and people.

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The BASR is pleased to be supporting the quinquennial IAHR conference in Krakow this year and we hope to see many of you there. As is our usual custom in an IAHR year, we will be running our annual conference for 2025 over a single day. This year, with thanks to the Open University for hosting, we have also chosen to run the conference online, in the hope that this will be as accessible to as many participants as possible.

We are therefore pleased to announce that the theme for this year’s conference will be, ‘Religion Space and Place’. Our keynote speaker will be Professor Lily Kong, a geographer who has written extensively on religion, with a focus on religion and urban change in Asian cities.

15-minute papers are welcome from all scholars, at any level of experience, on any dimension of

Religion Space and Place, including (but not limited to):

• Religion and pilgrimage;

• Religion and nationalism;

• Religion and populism;

• Religion and urban transformation;

• Religion and rural change;

• Religion, borders and stratification;

• Religion and tourism;

• Religion and architecture;

• Religion and virtual space;

• Religion, landscape and memory.

Papers are also welcome on any dimension of inter-disciplinary, theoretical or methodological reflection, including (but not limited to)

• Religious Studies and Geography;

• Theorising religious space and the places of religion;

• Feminist, post-colonial or post-humanist approaches to religion, space and place.

Submissions should be sent to basrconference2025@gmail.com by June 9 2025.

By David Robertson 

Every year, on April 1^st (today!), your news feed is filled with fake stories, designed to test your credulity. No, I’m not talking about post-truth disinformation – I’m talking about April Fools’ Day. Today’s media pranks are a very modern version of a much older tradition.

But just how much older? Like many of today’s traditions (Christmas or Mother’s Day, for example), most of what we now associate with April Fool’s Day dates back only to the Victorian period, when rapid industrialisation and urbanisation led to both an interest in preserving rural traditions that were in danger of being lost, as well as a process of standardisation, as people from different villages came together in the cities.

As well as pranks, today you will likely also come across articles explaining what these supposedly original, deeper religious roots of the day were—usually something like this:

In 1584, King Henry VIII passed the Act of Supremacy, which made the king to be the only head of the Church of England, declaring England independent from Papal authority. Although his daughter, Mary Tudor, reversed this, her successor Elizabeth I reinstated it and went even further, making it illegal not to be an Anglican. Roman Catholics, as well as puritan Protestants were prosecuted as recusants with fines, imprisonment and even capital punishment. One of the techniques used to identify recusants was to trick them into admitting they had broken their Lent fast on Maundy Thursday, rather than Holy Saturday as Anglicans did, and Anglicans were granted special leave to lie on the Friday in between. As Maundy Thursday often fell close to April 1^st, which was already a holiday, and so the date quickly became associated with these April Fools.

Although you will hear this story every April, it is not true! Rather, it’s an example of later anti-Catholic prejudice. As is often the case with traditions, the REAL story is far stranger and more interesting.

In the sixteenth century, a community grew up around Louis-Joseph Pseudos, Bishop of Abrille, in the Languedoc region of southern France. Psuedos was infamous for his heretical preaching that the Man Jesus and the God Christ were two different beings. Modern historians, notably Astley (1987), have argued that his anticlerical rhetoric was probably the actual reason he was excommunicated by Rome, in 1535. Pseudos continued to lead his community of followers as an independent Bishop, and eventually came to believe that the God Christ had incarnated in him, as well as the Man Jesus. The community began to call themselves the Poissons d’Abrille, but everyone else called them the Abrille Fools. Several records from across France and into modern Belgium over the following fifty years mention a game called “Abril’s Fools” being played during the Easter celebrations, in which children would go around the revellers telling lies in an attempt to winkle out the gullible, heretical Fools, who would then become the focus of boisterous mockery. This game soon spread to Britain, but with its name mispronounced to show that it was now stripped of its religious and political context.

So, this April Fools’ Day, remember Louis-Joseph Pseudos, and try not to believe every “true” story you read – even if it comes from a seemingly reputable source!

By Niall Oddy 

‘We’ve kind of forgotten that what underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture, and that’s where we need to start.’ These words emphasising the significance of faith in British society were uttered last month by Nigel Farage, the leader of the political party Reform UK.[i] But is religion really important in Britain? After all, the 2021 census indicated that less the half of the population of England and Wales considered themselves to be Christian and over half of Scottish people declared themselves to have no religion.[ii]

The relationship between religious identity and national identity is contentious. In contrast to Farage’s claim that British identity has ‘Judeo-Christian’ underpinnings, the National Secular Society campaigns to lessen the influence of religion in British society.[iii] Debates about the role of religion in society have a long history, and in this blog post I want to travel back to the sixteenth century, when the Protestant Reformation had unsettled the religious uniformity that had long prevailed in most of western Europe.

The spread of Protestantism forced governments to grapple with how to respond. In England, Henry VIII broke from Rome to establish an independent Church of England. In France, the monarchy remained steadfastly Catholic. Yet, around 10% of France’s population of 15 million converted to the Calvinist branch of Protestantism. Hardline Catholics opposed religious freedoms for this large minority. The monarchy’s attempts to broker compromise failed, leading to over three decades of warfare known as the French Wars of Religion (1562 – 98).

France was not the only country to experience bloodshed as a result of the Reformation. In fact, refugees fleeing religious persecution were so common that the historian Heiko Oberman coined the phrase the ‘Reformation of the Refugees’.[iv] John Calvin was one of over 5,000 French people who fled to the safety of Geneva as the city doubled in size. Basel, Strasbourg and Zurich were also safe places for exiles. As many as 100,000 Protestants from the Low Countries (Netherlands and Belgium) fled to cities in England and the Holy Roman Empire, including London, Cologne, Hamburg, and Frankfurt. Not every Protestant was a refugee, but enough were that exile was a significant and well-known part of Protestant experience, identity and culture. Religious reformers were conscious of belonging to a pan-European community that had suffered persecution and exile from their homeland.

The refugee experience can help us to think about the relationship between religious identity and national identity. What does it mean to have to leave your country of birth because of your religious identity? How does that feel? A travel account by one French Calvinist, Jean de Léry (1536 – 1613), offers some insights.

Born in France, Léry studied in Geneva, became a Calvinist minister and got embroiled in the French Wars of Religion. He was in Sancerre with many fellow Protestants in 1572 when Catholic forces began an eight-month siege that resulted in starvation and acts of cannibalism. Léry survived and eventually settled in Switzerland.

In 1578 Léry published an account of the time he spent in Brazil in 1557 – 58. His History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil recounted how he went with a group of Calvinists to assist with the establishment of a French colony. After some months, disagreements with the Catholics there about religious practices led to Léry and his co-religionists being expelled from the French fort. They spent time living with the indigenous Tupinamba people before returning to France.

In his published account Léry explores his split loyalties to his country and his faith.  He calls France ‘my homeland’ and of himself writes, ‘native Frenchman that I am, desirous of the honour of my prince’.[v] Monarchy, though, was problematic from the point of a Calvinist subject to a Catholic king. Writing twenty years after his return from Brazil, and having witnessed the horrors of the Wars of Religion, Léry is nostalgic about his time across the Atlantic and expresses his ‘regret’ that he is not there. For him, Brazil represented a potential safe haven from Catholic France and an opportunity to resolve the contradictions between religion and nationhood:

‘if we had stayed longer in that country, we would have drawn and won some of them to Jesus Christ [and…] there would be at present more than ten thousand Frenchmen who, besides staunchly protecting our island and our fort against the Portuguese […] would now possess under allegiance to our King a great country in the land of Brazil’.

Léry here blames the Catholics for the failure of the colony, expressing a belief that if the Calvinists had not been forced out, he would have been able to perform a service for both his faith and his country.

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By Paul-Francois Tremlett

Why were some Rastafari communities sceptical of the Covid vaccine? Why do some white, American evangelicals see the world through a lens of Biblical apocalypse? Over two days in January (20-21-01-25) an inter-disciplinary team of scholars assembled at the Open University to discuss the role of religious institutions, actors and communities in challenging but also in generating mis- and disinformation.

Organised by Dr Precious Chatterje-Doody from POLIS and Dr Paul-François Tremlett from Religious Studies, discussions focused around a cluster of themes including democracy, polarisation, social media and strategies for challenging disinformation, with papers engaging a range of contexts and case studies from China, the Philippines, Turkey, Ukraine, and the USA. From Satanic panics to millenarian dispensationalism, and from Covid scepticism among Rastafari to Pastoral letters condemning electoral manipulation, despite an abundance of examples of religious institutions, actors and communities as information actors, this is yet to coalesce into a research field.

The Religion and Disinformation Workshop highlights the role of religion in information networks and is funded by the Open Societal Challenges (OSC) at the Open University, and is seeking to lead research in the area. The workshop reflects one of the main aims of Democracy, Disinformation and Religion (DDR), which is to engage in and promote cross-disciplinary research on the understudied role of religious institutions and communities as information actors.

In the photograph, the workshop participants are gathered for the conference dinner. For further information about the project see Democracy, Disinformation and Religion (DDR) | Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences and/or get in touch with precious.chatterje-doody@open.ac.uk or paul-francois.tremlett@open.ac.uk.

By Friederike Uebel

As the creator of this artwork, I aimed to juxtapose the harsh reality of industrial agriculture with the gentler, sustainable practices of traditional farming. This piece serves as a stark reminder of the impact our choices have on biodiversity and the environment.

The centrepiece of the image is a museum exhibit, displaying various animals we still have today, but eerily labelled as extinct a century from now. The red deer, a species not currently critically endangered, is prominently featured. Its presence highlights the looming threat that industrial agriculture poses to flora and fauna. The exhibit is a forewarning, a projection of what might come if we continue on our current path.

Through the museum windows, the scene outside is twofold. On one side, a tractor sprays pesticides over a field under ominous grey clouds, symbolizing the destructive consequences of industrial farming. The pesticides, drifting like a toxic shroud, are a direct contributor to biodiversity loss and environmental degradation.

Contrasting this, the other side of the window shows people working the land with traditional methods. This ‘Window of Opportunity’ represents the potential for positive change. It suggests that by adopting sustainable practices, we can alter the trajectory of our future on Earth.

Through this artwork, I strive to evoke a sense of urgency and contemplation, encouraging viewers to reflect on the paths we tread and the legacy we wish to leave behind. It is both a warning and a beacon of hope, reminding us that the future of our planet rests in our hands.

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