Search

This chapter presents expressions of community within a church and a mosque in an eastside suburb. Empirical examples suggest that religious sameness is experienced as a stronger marker of community and neighbourship than co-habiting over time. While people may live close and share experiences of diversity, it appears more significant for a community to share religious affiliation. Using her empirical findings, Grung reflects on a possible relationship between culture, religion, and co-habiting. In addition, she asks a basic question: How to identify religious elements in existing ideas about neighbourship?

Data from a recent survey on pastoral care consultations (PCC) in Norway (N=408) is presented, showing that PCC is a service priests and deacons provide for people in the municipality, independent of faith affiliation. The most common PCC themes regarded mental and social distress, such as grief, conflicts, and loneliness. Furthermore, illness-related themes were prominent, and a specter of religious and moral issues. We discuss the results in the context of ongoing changes and reforms in both church and health care, and point at possible health promoting dimensions of PCC as existential assistance in the space between personal network support and public health care.

This article presents reflections over an internship module in the master programme “Leadership, Ethics and Counselling” at the Faculty of Theology, University of Oslo in the spring of 2020. This newly established master (2019) is equipping groups of students with different religions and worldviews for chaplaincy and leadership. The religiously and culturally plural learning environment that the master is aiming for doesn't just foster understanding of cross-religious and cross-cultural situations and contexts. It also has ambitions of shaping and altering the learning perspectives in professional chaplaincy training towards acknowledging the importance of co-formation, not just formation, in order to emphasize the meaning of relationships in learning processes and not merely the enhancement of individual knowledge and skill acquirement. This article will reflect on the learning situation of an internship module during the spring of 2020 in the master programme mentioned above, when social – or rather physical – distancing suddenly was the rule among the population due to the covid-19 pandemic. How does one teach and learn the skills necessary for generic chaplaincy, existential care and religiously-/worldview-based leadership while being confined to home? The article draws on practice theory and empirical research from other contexts in order to derive learning outcomes for this particular internship module and establishes crucial questions around internship within academic theology in the Nordic context. The main questions are: What is the educational gain from the pluralily referred to above, and what happens to internship training when the spatial circumstances for professional practice are changed into mandatory physical distancing? The article claims that working on these two questions relates to overarching questions around the place of practice in Nordic academic theology. An implicit question is whether it is possible to view practice as something happening only in a confined space.

This essay discusses the findings of a 2010 Norwegian research project that explored the hermeneutical strategies of Norwegian Muslim and Christian feminist readers as they read the Hagar narrative together. Interestingly, the women employed distinct interpretative reading strategies to develop meaningful interpretations. In their conversations the women addressed religious identity politics, fears in the majority Christian and post-Christian population about Muslims and Islam, feelings of alienation among the Norwegian Muslim minorities, or worries about gender justice in the neoliberal global world. Some readers limited the conversation to the canonical texts of their respective religious tradition whereas other readers explored the intertextuality of relevant Christian and Muslim texts. The women readers understood that their particular religious understanding of the Hagar story was incomplete if they did not know the interpretative tradition of the other religious community. Overall, then, the study yields important insights about interreligious readings of the Bible, Qur’an, and the Hadith for a religiously and socially diverse society such as Norway.

In most countries of Western Europe including Norway, the last decades have transformed the population as a whole to become both more secular and more religiously plural. This has had consequences on many levels, and is still being processed. For state institutions and for the civil society including faith communities, it has clearly entailed legal, political, and social changes. The growing plurality has also challenged alleged mono-cultural perceptions of religions, and established many new discourses on religion, values, and diversity as such. In this essay I will first briefly discuss the present situation in Norway regarding religious pluralism and relate it to interpretations of secularity particularly relevant to the Norwegian context. Then I will go more thoroughly into the concept of interreligious dialogue and ways to understand this phenomenon as one of faith communities’ responses to religious plurality. As a social practice that may provide insight in how religious plurality is negotiated in a dialogue – it may be described as a practical exploration of religious plurality from the inside - but also how it may project positions towards various understandings of secularity. Peter Berger’s concept of “The two pluralisms” and his request for theorizing on plurality rather than secularity opens up further exploration of interreligious relations such as interreligious dialogue, and it may provide researchers working empirically in this field with new insights in their studies. This contribution will not contest Berger’s suggestion of “the two pluralisms” but rather explore it further through empirical studies and suggested models of interreligious dialogue.