The Brussels Office of the Bahá'í International Community (BIC) held a meeting on Religion and the European Public Sphere, at the European Academy of Religion “Ex Nihilo Zero Conference” in Bologna.

The meeting held at the European Academy of Religion in June follows an earlier meeting held in December 2016 in Brussels, where the Baha’i International Community, Brussels Office in collaboration with the Conference of European Churches (CEC) and the Centre for Religion, Conflict and the Public Domain of the University of Groningen facilitated a conversation between policymakers, practitioners and academics to examine the changing religious landscapes in Europe and to reflect on the role of religion in European public life.

The Baha’i International Community, Brussels Office representative Rachel Bayani shared how “leaders of policy and thought have for many years assumed that religion would become less important in European societies, as the forces of modernity advanced, and that the rest of the world would gradually follow the same course. However, events during the past decades have made this narrative difficult to maintain.”

This realization of religions’ increasing relevance in European life made apparent the need to organise spaces that allow for exploring the role of religion in European public sphere, in ways that move beyond the increasingly prevalent tendency to view religion as either victim or oppressor.

Ms Bayani shared the need “to find ways to think meaningfully about religion’s constructive potentialities which go beyond distinctions between the secular and religious.”

“Part of the challenge,” Ms Bayani emphasized at the meeting in Bologna, “is to create pattern of public discourse in which religion’s constructive insights are tapped into and in which all people can meaningfully contribute.”