Study day of the research project developed within CU-CNRS Tandem Program supported by Charles University, CNRS and CEFRES.
Date: September 21–22, 2026
Location: CEFRES, Na Florenci 3, Prague 1 & online (to get the link, please write to: cefres@cefres.cz)
Language: English
Presentation
Research on the agency of religious buildings in Europe has expanded considerably over the past two decades, yet it remains fragmented along disciplinary, regional, and confessional lines. While theology, architecture, real estate studies, sociology, art history, and anthropology all contribute to this field, heritage studies has become one of its most influential frameworks. Within this perspective, religious buildings—whether historic or contemporary, active, transformed, or abandoned—are predominantly understood as heritage.
This framing highlights the historicity of religious buildings, their architectural significance, and their role in religious, communal, and national traditions. At the same time, it may obscure other dimensions of their agency: their economic and ecological entanglements, their more-than-human relations, their capacity to shape everyday practices and affects, or even their exclusive, disciplinary, and oppressive effects. To frame a building as heritage is not merely to describe it but to enact a particular mode of valuation, mobilising normative, emotional, legal, and political discourses that perform the building as worthy of preservation, protection, and stabilization.
Program
Monday, 21 September
13:00 Welcome words
13:15 – 14:00 Ferdinand de JONG (anthropologist and heritage scholar, FU Berlin)
Agency, Affordances and Affects: Perspectives from Critical Heritage Studies
14:00 – 14:30 Q&A
14:30 – 15:00 Coffee break
15:00 – 15:45 Kate JORDAN (historian of architecture, Westminster University)
Religious Heritage as Resource for Identity, Belonging, Exclusion and Populism (online)
15:45 – 16:30 Anne FORNEROD (legal scholar, Université Strasbourg)
Religious Heritage as Legal Challenge in Europe
16:30 – 17:00 Coffee break
17:00 – 17:45 Tomáš ŘEPA (historian of architecture, Czech National heritage institute)
Heritage Conservation in Socialist Czechoslovakia Following the Second Vatican Council, with Particular Regard to Religious Buildings
17:45 – 18:30 Solomiia BRYZHOVATA (anthropology student, Charles University Prague)
Heritage in Military Conflicts
Tuesday, 22 September
9:00 – 9:45 Samuel GOYVAERTS (theologian, Tilburg University)
Theological Agency of Religious Building and Interferences with Religious Heritage Understandings (online)
9:45 – 10:30 Norbert SCHMIDT (architect, head of the Centre for theology and art of Czech christian Academy)
Artistic and Architectural Interventions in Religious Buildings – Where Is the Place of the Heritage?
10:30 – 11:00 Coffee break
11:00 –11:45 Dominika DLUGOSZ (architect, Politechnica Krakowska)
Between Preservation and Transformation: Adaptive Reuse of Historic Churches in Poland – Selected Case Studies and Conservation Boundaries (online)
11:45 – 12:30 Barbora SPALOVÁ, Anne FORNEROD, Agnieszka HALEMBA: Closing words
© Ivan Pinkava: Noční práce, postní intervence v akademickém kostele Nejsvětějšího Salvátora, 2025
photo: Petr Neubert