The Center for Religious Studies is a research department at Ruhr University Bochum, Germany. It is dedicated to research into the dynamics of religion based on religious contact and the interaction of religion with other societal spheres such as politics,
economics, science, and arts and combines expertise from the philologies, history, area studies, cultural studies, and the social sciences. It concentrates on processes of tradition building and transformation as well as on the specificities of religious language, especially religious metaphors.