Emiliano Urciuoli presents a working paper on 'Citification of Religion: What Is It?'

Aim of this paper is to propose a serviceable analytical distinction between ‘urbanization’ and ‘citification’ of religion as two sets of processes and states of affairs concerning the role of religion/s in city-spaces. Inspired by both religious studies and political theory, this distinction is pivotal for my ongoing research on early Christ religion as an ‘urban religion’. In order to justify the differentiation at issue, I will first embark on a brief ‘world tour’ across a constellation of topics related to the deep history of both religion and urbanism as cross-cultural, deep-rooted, and inextricably related strategies of handling, enhancing, and buying into human sociality. Browsing a century and a half of narratives on the rise of the earliest cities, I will show that religion plays a rather standard and visibly one-sided role in the scholarly plots of urbanization. A different story needs to be told. Thus, once discussed a specific use of the verb ‘to citify’ in contemporary religious studies, I will sketch out the short and highly idiosyncratic history of the term ‘citification’ as a technical category. Lastly, I will illustrate how I intend to use the formula ‘citification of religion’ for re-describing the urban history of early Christ religion according to a different perspective and agenda. Some final reflections on the comparative character of the concept will conclude the paper.

Jörg Rüpke is going to present a working paper on 'Beyond Urban religion'

If ‘urban religion’ can serve as a lens onto the historical entanglement of cities or even more loosely ‘urban settlements’, it is the spatial character of religion that needs to be understood and theoretically modelled. In the history of research, ‘sacred places’ have played a prominent role as loci of epiphanic character, above all in phenomenological approaches to religion, but also in studies of roles of sacred centres or pilgrimage. In many other perspectives, the temporal aspects of religion (routine, crisis rituals and rites de passage, conversion, calendar) have been foregrounded, place has been reduced to a mere setting. This paper attempts at reconstructing religious action as a spatial practice that is sensitive to and creative of the character of settlements. On that basis it tries to develop a grid of analytical perspectives for the interaction with urban space.

Emiliano Urciuoli is going to present a working paper on ' The (Good) People Next Door - Neighborhoods, Urban Religion and Early Christ-Religion'

Archeologists agree that “the spatial division of cities into residential zones is a universal feature of urban life from the earliest cities to the present” (Smith 2010). Yet, ubiquitous and longstanding though they may be, city-centered research on “urban Christians” has thus far paid little attention to neighborhoods. A neighborhood-focused analysis of the communication of early Christ religion within imperial cities is a most recent analytical enterprise. House-based descriptions have been largely preferred and taken as though they can tell the whole truth about the city life of Jesus followers and, eventually, the “citification” of their cult. As is often the case, the prolific writer Tertullian comes to the rescue: in a fleeting passage of his Apology, he states that, when it comes to “benevolence” and “good actions”, “we Christians, are the same to the Emperors as we are to our neighbors (Idem sumus imperatoribus qui et vicinis nostris)”. Good deeds Christians did and/or claimed to do for emperors are well known (payment of taxes, military enlistment, prayers, sometimes even sacrifices). What about the neighbors? What can we know about what a Jesus follower did for her/his vicinis? Introducing some contextualizing snapshots of neighborhood issues and explaining the potential of a neighborhood-scaled analysis conducted with an Urban Religion approach, this paper’s aim is to probe how material evidence from Greco-Roman urban environments and literary texts produced by Jesus followers have been critically surveyed in order to sharpen or question the knowledge on early Christ religion as viewed from a street-level perspective. Some final notes will show the extent to which our “sources” can be further surveyed in order to shed more light on this crucial aspect of an urban religion and eventually answer the following question: how did the need to establish neighborly neighboring relationships in densely populated urban districts affect Christ religion and its self-representation?