Researching religion in public institutions: Context, object, and methods

The increasing vitality and variety of religious identities in Europe give rise to new claims and demands by religious minorities. This generates new challenges for the articulation of the religious and the secular in European democracies, which become especially salient in public institutions such as hospitals, prisons, and schools. This special issue focuses on public institutions with the aim to examine how state and religion encounter one another in contemporary Western societies. We take public institutions as privileged observatories for understanding the changing place of religion but also as laboratories in which new arrangements are experimented. The articles analyse the presence, regulation, and negotiation of religion and religious diversity in public institutions across Europe combining innovative empirical enquiries with theoretical and methodological reflections.