Vierter Vortrag von Corinne Bonnet im Rahmen der Monday-Lectures, die gemeinsam von Max-Weber-Kolleg, Seminar für Religionswissenschaft sowie dem Theologischen Forschungskolleg t³ Theologie — Tradition — Transformation veranstaltet werden.
The concept of polis religion has been the subject, in recent decades, of quite radical criticism. However, as the Urban Religion project shows, the city is a particularly dense space in divine presences, in rituals, in monuments… How can we today thematize the relationship between the gods and the city, understood as a political entity, in the Greek world and beyond? In what spaces and in what socio-political, institutional or informal contexts do the gods intervene? We will focus here on their presence at the gymnasium, at the prytaneum, at the assembly and at the tribunal, at the agora, at the theatre, at the borders, at the crossroads, in the garrisons, in the palaces, in the libraries… What does this omnipresence of the gods do to human inhabitants in daily life and in the very functioning of political life? Do these questions, considered on the scale of a city or an empire, call for different answers? How is the collective and individual dimension of religious practices inscribed in space, through concrete communication devices? Here too, the reflection will be based on specific case studies, mainly in Greece and in the Near East.
