02/07/2026 09:00 - 11:10

HALL: Pola - A103

Chair: Tolstoj K.

Contact: Beliakova N.

This panel starts from the diagnosis that dominant theological frameworks circulating within European academic and ecclesial contexts now operate in a post-imperial condition for which their inherited analytical and normative resources no longer suffice. In the aftermath of the Soviet collapse and amid renewed large-scale war in Europe, theological discourse continues to rely on categories shaped by the Cold War, moral universalism, and abstract invocations of peace. These categories fail to correspond to social realities marked by asymmetrical violence, ideological mobilization, and persistent inequalities of suffering, authority, and moral visibility. They also tend to evade the most difficult questions by stabilizing inherited vocabularies rather than exposing them to critical pressure. The panel therefore proceeds explicitly under the sign of theologies after: theology after empire, after state atheism, after the loss of peace as a self-evident ordering category, and after the presumed moral clarity of late twentieth-century paradigms.
The panel is organized around deliberately uncomfortable theological, theoretical, and methodological questions that contemporary theology and the humanities often neglect. How do religious actors operate when peace initiatives are structurally entangled with power, surveillance, and geopolitical asymmetry? How does martyrdom function once it ceases to be a closed chapter of memory and becomes an operative theological grammar ordering visibility, authority, and inequality in the present? How can theology articulate responsibility and guilt under conditions of ongoing war without collapsing into ideological mobilization or moral abstraction?