Lecture Series "Sacred Times": From the End Times to the Secular? Notes on the Genesis of Progress and Future Thought in Western Modernity

February 2, 2023: Prof. Dr. Anne-Charlott Trepp (historian in Kassel) - Von der Endzeit zum Säkulum? Notes on the Genesis of Progress and Future Thinking in Western Modernity.

Last part of the ring­before­le­sung "Hei­li­ge Zei­ten. Ver­stän­di­gun­gen zwi­schen Theo­lo­ gie undKul­tur­wis­sen­schaft"
The "sacred" is never "given" as such, but shows itself exclusively in the profane. Therein lies an insurmountable bond of the sacred to culture in its changing, historical forms of expression. The understanding of the sacred is thus always also an understanding of the cultural and refers theology to the perspectives and methods of cultural studies.
In the lecture series "Sacred Times" we will look from different disciplinary perspectives for what constitutes the quality of the "sacred". The aim is to find out which strategies and techniques of demarcation are effective: What makes times "sacred", how are differences to "normal" times produced, what practices are associated with them, where do religious conceptualizations of time continue to have an effect in the secular? Time is not to be understood solely as a medium that is more or less fixed in its structure. Rather, it is about temporality in its religious-cultural forms of appropriation, which in turn can be reflected theologically as well as philosophically and considered with regard to their respective situation of the (religious) subject. Finally, the question of the sacred is posed: How do conceptualizations of time affect the ideas of and dealings with the sacred, which can only be thought of as accessible to man insofar as it manifests itself in the temporal?