Making Ends Meet: Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the End of Times in Medieval Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, Institut für Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte Asiens (IKGA), Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, September 24–26, 2015
A main goal of the conference Cross-Cultural Perspectives on the End of Times is to trace the social dynamics and discursive strategies behind the different visions of the End of Times in various cultural and religious areas. It aims not only to study the exchange of ideas between East and West, but also to broaden approaches so as to work towards a more differentiated view of eschatological notions in general. Studying and comparing Muslim, Brahmanical, Buddhist and Christian eschatological beliefs will shed light on the dynamic relations between processes of social identification and apocalyptic interpretations. In other words: To what extent did eschatological thought influence political and religious (self-)perception?
This conference is part of a series of joint activities of renowned scholars from the fields of History, Social Anthropology, Tibetan Studies/Buddhist Studies, Theology, Religious Studies, Byzantine Studies and Iranian Studies, who started to comparatively address the question of how eschatological visions affected religious communities and political structures in Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. It is our aim to combine medieval contexts with broader methodological questions generated by, among others, theology, social anthropology, and modern theories of source criticism.