How are religious communities and practices being reshaped in the 21st century across national boundaries, through digital mediation, and amidst warfare and displacement? The session brings together two papers that examine how religious life persists, adapts, and transforms across radically different but equally consequential contexts: transnational ritual worlds and wartime mobilization. They foreground the ways religious actors construct continuity, meaning, and obligation amid disruption. The Religion in Europe Unit hopes to facilitate a conversation that, in keeping with the Presidential theme for 2026, highlights possible futures for religions even as older certainties of what constitutes "religion" or "Europe" break down.
Among the many relational threads linking the transnationally dispersed social world of Tenrikyo Europe Center (TEC), located in a Parisian suburb, digital forms of communication and interaction play a constitutive role in extending, sustaining, and occasionally transforming connections. This paper focuses on a single concentrated moment: the 130th anniversary of the Foundress' withdrawal from physical life, an event carrying deep significance for Tenrikyo followers worldwide. Connection to what was occurring in Tenri City (Japan) moved through two interwoven channels, one through the ritual practice of uniting hearts with the Jiba, the sacred point around which the primary ritual occurred, the other through the digital circulation of images and messages, mirroring one another in how they enabled affective and relational ties to traverse geographic distance. The anniversary commemoration is thus one expression of a broader capacity to collapse time and space in ways that keep religious worlds alive across distance.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 intensified a process that began in 2014: the deep entanglement of religion, volunteerism, and military chaplaincy under prolonged wartime conditions. As the conflict persists, the number of volunteers and clergy declines due to exhaustion and casualties, while frontline spiritual and humanitarian needs continue to grow, making religious networks a key infrastructure of wartime mobilization. This paper introduces the concept of «adrenaline spirituality», a form of religious experience shaped by sustained exposure to danger and moral urgency. It argues that prolonged frontline engagement produces a profound and often irreversible transformation of consciousness among volunteers and chaplains. The study proposes a three-stage model: moral mobilization, normative conflict, and the exhaustion–dependency paradox, where burnout coexists with an inability to disengage. This framework contributes to international debates on religion, trauma, and wartime spirituality.