30/06/2026 14:30 - 17:30

HALL: Parenzo - A2

Contact: Prochwicz-Studnicka B.

Chair: Byrski L., Grzywa A.

This panel is devoted to examining social inequalities in the Abrahamic religions, with particular attention to the relationship between the religious legitimation of existing hierarchies and their contestation or problematization. In other words, it seeks to explore how Judaism, Christianity, and Islam justified social inequalities, in which contexts they relativized or symbolically suspended them, and when and why they became objects of critique.
We aim to address these questions through an analysis of both the foundational texts of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and other early sources within each tradition (such as rabbinic literature, patristic writings, or early Islamic texts) that developed, reinterpreted, or concretized religious - often socio-legal - norms in changing historical and social circumstances. We are also interested in how communal practices generated cohesion and identity while simultaneously demarcating boundaries by regulating access to material, institutional, symbolic, ritual, or social resources. "Communal practices" are understood broadly as institutional, ritual, and socio-legal forms of communal life - kehilla, ecclesia, and umma.
The panel is interdisciplinary: we invite scholars of religion, anthropologists of religion, social historians, biblical scholars, specialists in Islamic and Near Eastern studies, cultural studies scholars, and all others whose research focuses on Judaism, Christianity, or Islam.