ESITIS 2024 Robert Vosloo - Religious Traditions, Intellectual Postures and Incompleteness

Full title: Religious Traditions, Intellectual Postures and Incompleteness: In Search of a Responsible Hermeneutic of Tradition for Interreligious Engagement
Robert Vosloo is a professor of systematic theology at the Stellenbosch University. He is currently the chairperson of the department of Systematic
Theology and Ecclesiology, as well as the editor-in-chief of the Stellenbosch Theological Journal. His most recent academic books are Reading Bonhoeffer in South Africa After the Transition to Democracy: Selected Essays (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2020, with Nico Koopman) and Reforming Memory: Essays on South African Church and Theological History (Stellenbosch, Sun Media, 2017). His research interests include historical memory, 20th century South African church and theological history, philosophical and theological discourses on hospitality and recognition, and the theology of Dietrich Bonhoeffer. In 2023 Robert spent a semester as fellow at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Studies. Since September 2017 he also writes a weekly column for an Afrikaans newspaper. Robert is married to Julie Claassens, a professor in Old Testament at Stellenbosch University, and has three children, Jana (28), Roux (27), and Suzanne (11).
2024 ESITIS Conference explored the radical pluralities at the heart of contemporary interreligious engagement. Its geographical and methodological pluralities provide new generative possibilities for understanding, as voices from the majority world contribute perspectives that reflect local historical trajectories, and as disciplines within the political sciences furnish conceptual tools that complement a focus on texts and rituals in theology and religious studies and the sociology and anthropology of religion. Understanding the role of religion vis à vis governmental and international relations provides new resources for understanding the forces that shape religious life within and between traditions and provides new opportunities to build peaceful relations.