Research

The ecological crises and their social consequences pose new questions for the self-image of man and, in this respect, also for theological anthropology. Today, the problematic nature of the strict separation of man from his non-human environment, which is based on the theorem of the image of God (Genesis 1:26), among other things, is becoming increasingly apparent: it was and still is deduced from this that everything non-human may be subjected to the benefit of man - with consequences such as the exploitation of natural resources, the excesses of factory farming, the extinction of species caused by human activity and the destruction of the foundations of life. New impulses are coming from philosophies and theologies that not only question the central position of humans, but also fundamentally challenge juxtapositions such as nature - human, nature - culture, spirit - matter, spirit - body, etc. and question the associated hierarchies.

The research seminar, designed as a reading seminar, deals with philosophical and theological concepts that can be attributed to post-anthropocentrism, including Karen Barad, Donna Haraway, Ivone Gebara, Catherine Keller and Elizabeth Johnson.

Biblical and post-biblical Christian talk of God has a history. How God is spoken of correlates with different historical and cultural contexts. Speech about God is a response to changing problems that people have to deal with and, in the tradition and theological reflection of the texts, opens up new possibilities for people to find their place in the world. Not least the negotiations of gender make it clear that the image of God always contains normative orientations. "If God is man", as the feminist theologian Mary Daly once put it in a nutshell, "then the masculine is God".

The course explored the history of this reflection on God, starting with the biblical texts and the formulation of the Trinitarian dogma through to contemporary reflections on God. This was done from a gender-sensitive perspective, which focused in particular on the interactions between the image of God and gender politics.

Conflicts are part of life. They range from minor differences of opinion to loud arguments and violent confrontations. They can be sporadic, but can also extend over longer periods of time, shatter relationships permanently and lead to a breakdown in communication. They affect individuals, but also groups and entire nations.

With concepts such as "confession of guilt", "repentance", "forgiveness" and "reconciliation", Christianity has provided strategies for dealing with conflicts that are still part of everyday culture today. However, these are not without ambivalence. After all, is forgiveness not an unjustified response to injustice suffered? Isn't insisting on a confession of guilt also a strategy that humiliates the other person and puts you in a position of power? And how is reconciliation even possible? The seminar explores the dynamics and ambivalences of forgiveness and reconciliation by examining relevant texts from theology and philosophy.

The seminar includes an excursion to the exhibition "Streit! An Approach" at the Museum for Communication in Frankfurt.

Feminist theology has always been more than a theology by women for women. Based on the concrete experiences of people and women in particular, feminist theologians have always been concerned with making often strictly drawn boundaries permeable: between science and social practice, between abstract thinking and spirituality, between theological jargon and everyday language, between man and nature. The fruits of this are theologies that focus on concrete, everyday life and thereby put it to the test: What effect do faith and theology have on people's lives?

With theologians such as Maaike de Haardt from the Netherlands, Elizabeth Johnson from the USA and Marcella Althaus-Reid from Brazil, the research seminar is dedicated to outstanding feminist theologians from different parts of the world.

"Sacred times" - systematic theological perspectives

Religions structure temporality. They rhythmize the course of days and years, create interruptions or standardize the general relationship to time - for example, by placing time under tension with the expectation of a dawning end or by characterizing earthly time as provisional and a time of transition. The Christian approaches to temporality today stand in contrast to a conception of time that has become dominant, according to which time continues to run on a linear timeline, is economically available and every event loses significance because at some point it is simply "over". The seminar deals with various conceptions of temporality from a systematic theological perspective, primarily from Christianity, but also from Judaism and Islam. The seminar integrates several guest lectures, which can also be attended separately as part of the lecture series "Holy Times".

Sustainability and justice - the (theological) connection between two dimensions

Since Lynn T. White's famous article The historical roots of our ecological crisis from 1966, Christianity has been held partly responsible for the ecological crisis in its interpretation of the Bible. It is not only the dominion mandate from Genesis 1:28 that is held against it. Even more fundamentally, it is the talk of man as the crown of creation and the anthropocentrism derived from this, which construes nature as a counterpart and has fundamentally severed the connection between man and the world around him. With far-reaching consequences. If Christianity is now held responsible for the ecological crisis in this way, can it also contribute to overcoming it?

Here, it is not only important to build on Christian traditions that indicate the interdependence of creation and humanity and which are currently being reconsidered. The link between sustainability and justice and the facilitation of life opportunities is central here. This opens up the topic of sustainability theologically from a perspective that Documenta 15 focuses on with the concept title Lumbung . The encounter with contemporary art is to be understood as a locus theologicus . It is a place where established habits of seeing and thinking can be unlearned and new sensitivities can be acquired in order to gain a new perspective on Christian traditions. Conversely, the debates on sustainability and justice are also permeated by religious motifs, and the planned exhibition in the Elisabethkirche is a prime example of this interchange.

The seminar aims to sensitize students to the connections between sustainability and justice by developing and discussing relevant theological positions and examining specific works of art. The aim is to enable students to critically evaluate current sustainability debates as well as to be able to argue a genuinely theological contribution.

Time and justice

The connection between the concepts of time and justice can be illustrated with a few questions: How seriously is injustice taken if time simply moves on until everything that has been done and suffered sinks into oblivion? On the other hand, how heavy are the relationships and actions if everything were to keep coming back? Finally, how urgent does the work for justice seem if it is expected from a future beyond? In view of the repercussions of the conceptions of time on the interpretation of the world and action in it, the New Political Theology and in particular Johann Baptist Metz have criticized the conception of a linear time without a time limit that has become dominant in modern times and contrasted it with the biblical conceptions of a limited, even apocalyptic time that requires remembrance and objection.

The research seminar deals with concepts of time from philosophy and theology, including Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Johann Baptist Metz and Kurt Appel. There will also be the opportunity to present and discuss current research projects.

Jacques Dupuis - a Christian theology of religious pluralism

The question of the theological recognition of non-Christian religions is currently one of the most pressing issues. However, the "theology of religions", which deals with this topic, currently seems to have come to a kind of standstill. Inclusivism and pluralism mark two positions between which the boundary of orthodoxy and heresy is identified. But the question is by no means off the table: would it be conceivable to actually open up Christianity to other religions without running the risk of losing what is genuinely Christian?

The Belgian Jesuit and theologian Jacques Dupuis (1923-2004) provided impetus, the potential of which is only slowly being discovered, at least in German-speaking countries. In his central work Unterwegs zu einer christlichen Theologie des religiösen Pluralismus (Towards a Christian Theology of Religious Pluralism ), he understands religions as a God-given richness that must not be "endured", but rather positively valued out of the deepest Christian conviction.

The research seminar is dedicated to reading central sections of this book.

Racism and religion

At the beginning of the new millennium, a "new religious intolerance" (Martha Nussbaum) can be observed in Western, democratic countries: People are experiencing personal or institutional discrimination and even physical violence on the basis of a religious affiliation that is visible or even just ascribed to them. The increase in anti-Semitic and anti-Islamist crimes in Germany is just the tip of the iceberg. More fundamental are (culturally) racist attitudes that ascribe or deny certain characteristics to members of minority religions and derive corresponding behavior towards them from this. Such attitudes are also represented with reference to "Christian values" and can also be found in Christian, for example right-wing Catholic circles, right up to high-ranking church officials. The research seminar examines the fundamental manifestations, thought strategies and motives of religious racism, sheds light on theoretical explanatory models and discusses counter-strategies.

Telling God - Narrative theology

Christian theology must be a narrative theology. For only a narrative theology does not detach itself from the events of history. And only a narrative is capable of keeping the memory of its victims alive. With these theses on a narrative theology, the recently deceased Johann Baptist Metz had turned against forms of systematic theology that seek to transfer the content of Christianity into the timelessness of the concept or discursively composed systems. But are narrative texts really an alternative theological form of thought to established discursivity? How do they shape theological content? How should we assess the fact that the majority of biblical texts are (fictional) narratives? And what are narratives anyway? To answer these questions, the research seminar deals with theological positions on narrative theology, but also with literary narratology and philosophical narrative theories, and tests these on the basis of biblical texts.

(Gender) diversity and justice

The lives of people today - children, young people and adults - are (to a greater or lesser extent) permeated by diversity. Some of these differences have always shaped the way we live together, such as the differences between the sexes, which have been dramatized differently throughout the ages. Others are coming into focus anew today due to the convergence of cultures in a globalized world shaped by migration and the pluralization of society.

Diversity becomes a topic of theology not least because it inevitably raises the question of justice: diversity requires justice to take into account that the same does not mean the same for people in different situations. From a theological perspective, diversity is not unproblematic from the outset. The theological tradition, in its engagement with various philosophical systems, has understood diversity primarily as a deviation from the true and the good. This still characterizes the rather negative assessment of diversity today - for example in the reservations about different lifestyles (in contrast to the classic family ideal) or the persistent adherence to gender stereotypes.

The advanced seminar will deal with various philosophical and theological texts on the current discussion on diversity, including Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Spivak, Judith Butler, Pope Francis, Kwok Pui Lan and Mayra Rivera Rivera.

Desire (appetitus, desiderium) is a basic category in Christian theological discourse on human beings. Man is not sufficient unto himself. They desire things, other people, in order to achieve a sense of wholeness, of fullness, of meaning. Ultimately, as the Christian tradition has described since Augustine at the latest, man finds this fulfillment in God. Desire, which has to do with sexual desire but means something more comprehensive, thus becomes the key to the relationship with God.

Desire also currently plays a central role in secular, psychoanalytically inspired philosophies and cultural theories. As a permanent search for meaning, desire makes people culturally productive and makes them search for new ways of expression and meaning. The seminar looks for connections between the theological and philosophical-cultural-scientific thematizations of desire on the basis of relevant texts, including Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Sigmund Freud, Julia Jacques Lacan and Gilles Deleuze.

The Second Vatican Council's Constitution on Revelation, Dei Verbum, defined revelation more precisely as God's self-communication. God does not primarily communicate something, i.e. not, or at least not primarily, specific content. Rather, revelation means a personal encounter. This encounter, in turn, is essentially communicated via texts - those of the Bible, but also the theological and spiritual texts of the history of Christianity. But how can we reasonably think that another person, that God, is encountered in the reading of texts? In order to make this plausible, the seminar will refer to current text theories and discuss their applicability to theological/biblical texts.

The question of how to deal with foreigners is one of the central issues of our time. In a globalized world, foreigners do not remain "outside" and we ourselves are increasingly rarely "at home". People who perceive and label each other as "different" have to find ways to live with or alongside each other. The stranger seems as fascinating as he is threatening. In a strange way, as the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva notes, the stranger is within us. It is the hidden side of ourselves and prevents us from forming fixed ego or we identities. After all, God shows himself as a stranger, in the stranger, as has been proven many times in the Bible. If we consistently isolate ourselves from the stranger, how can we encounter God?
The research seminar deals with philosophical and theological texts on the stranger (e.g. Arendt, Camus, Kristeva, Spivak, Levinas, Appel). Independent reading of the texts, which will then be discussed in the sessions, is a prerequisite.

The phenomena of power represent an inescapable challenge for theology. Christianity organizes a relationship to the world. It offers guidance to people who are looking for guidelines for their actions. In the light of faith, power relations appear as legitimate or illegitimate, receive confirmation or criticism. The peculiarity of monotheistic religions to refer to an absolute is perceived as extraordinarily productive of power. How do the connections to power materialize? What concept of power can be used to trace them? How do different Christian denominations deal with this topic? The seminar explores these questions by reading selected texts by Michel Foucault, Jan Assmann and L.V. Litvinova, among others.