Religion as Practice and Discourse
Religion as Practice and Discourse
This emphasis channels research on religion(s) in both a diachronic and synchronic perspective. Scholarship in this area focuses on religious practices and the history of religion, as well as discourses within and on religions. The individual fields of research were developed in long-term projects with national and international visibility. Distinguished research centers and colleges (ZAR, IKGF) organize the fields’ interdisciplinary networks and cooperation within the faculty and beyond. Moreover, elite programs such as the successfully established master’s program “Ethics of Text Cultures” and the new degree in “Standards of Decision-Making across Cultures” further support the research emphasis’s interdisciplinary focus. Scholarship in this area is distinguished by research across religious and disciplinary boundaries: approaches in cultural studies, philology, and historiography are aligned to engage in fruitful discussions on diverse practices and discourses in different religions and in various historical and cultural contexts. Although the religious character of practices, objects, spaces, persons, and discourses has been and is being repeatedly attested, it is also possible to attest that religion rarely has been clearly defined. It is necessary to negotiate time and again what can be referred to as “religious.” Therefore, of importance are particularly questions regarding how orders, convictions, and practices attained a religious connotation. This can be researched both transculturally and transregionally. However, the research focus does not merely aim to develop a closed-off systematicity of how the religious is constructed. It promotes and interweaves individual research projects that analyze how that which is understood as “religion” transformed and was negotiated within its concrete historical contexts. To achieve this, the research focus provides a scholarly platform where diverse projects can be interwoven to stimulate interdisciplinary synergy. “Religion as Practice and Discourse” is a product of several joint research projects, such as the Research Unit “Sacrality,” and, since 2011, the Central Institute of the Anthropology of Religion(s) (ZAR). This is accompanied by intense discussion on possibly innovative thematic emphases regarding future joint research projects:
Knowledge – Temporality – Cultural Comparison
Concepts of Boundaries in the Middle East
Cultural Difference and Transcontinental Connectivity in Antiquity
Projects:
Alttestamentliche Anthropologien: Human in the Old Testament - implicit Anthropologies in the Scriptures of Israel und the Early Judaism
Qānūn: Christian Society under Muslim Rule: Canon Collections from Medieval Spain
The establishment of Muslim rule over vast
parts of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 initiated a profound transformation of
the political, societal, and cultural conditions, which soon marginalized the autochthonous
Christian communities in Southern Iberia. The Christians in medieval al-Andalus
had to develop various strategies of acculturation to adapt to these changed
conditions.
The Islamic Law granted Christians a
protected but inferior legal status, allowing them administrative and juridical
autonomy in internal affairs. However, very little is known, so far, about the
practice of this inner-Christian self-government. Valuable insights are to be
expected from an extraordinary, yet hitherto rather neglected source: the unique
Arabic version of the Hispana Canon law collection, preserved in an 11th-century
manuscript from the Escorial Library.
The international research project
"Qanun" examines this law code as the normative basis of the communal
autonomy of the Christian minorities in al-Andalus. The focus will be both on
the legal contents of the collection as well as on the techniques of adaptation
and translation of Christian knowledge and tradition into the linguistic and
cultural codes of the dominating Islamic-Arabic elites in al-Andalus.
RebeL: Religiöse und berufsbezogene Überzeugungen von Lehrkräften (RebeL)
1. Introduction
Research evidence indicates that teachers’ personal beliefs (e.g. worldview; anthropology; ethical convictions) are in correlation with their professional thinking and acting. The following reasons suggest that this is true especially for religious beliefs.
- In the psychology of religion, religious beliefs are conceived of as particularly significant beliefs for religious persons that potentially shape their whole lives.
- Normatively, educational o…
Creation
Eschatology: Logic and subjects
Christliche Archäologie und byzantinische Kunstgeschichte
Zum 1. Oktober 2018 wird an der Johannes Gutenberg-Universität in Mainz ein neues geisteswissenschaftliches Graduiertenkolleg eingerichtet. Die DFG bewilligte das interdisziplinäre GRK 2304 „Byzanz und die euromediterranen Kriegskulturen: Austausch, Abgrenzung und Rezeption“, an dem insgesamt zwölf Wissenschaftlerinnen und Wissenschaftler aus verschiedenen historischen, archäologischen und theologischen Fächern sowie der Musikwissenschaft beteiligt sind, die von der Antike bis zur Frühen Neuzeit f…
ReReRi: Religion als Ressource und Risiko. Eine empirische mixed-methods Studie zur Religiosität von Jugendlichen mit Fluchthintergrund
We know from existing empirical studies that young people with migration and refugee background tend to be highly religious. For refugee youth, however, the significance of their religiosity for their life and their integration has hardly been the object of research. Nor has the development of their religiosity in the context of their new home country. It can be assumed that religiosity can function both as a resource for better coping with life and integration as well as a risk that impairs life…
KCID Key Concepts in Interreligious Discourses. Judaism, Christianity and Islam
FOR 1533: FOR 1533: Sakralität und Sakralisierung in Mittelalter und Früher Neuzeit. Interkulturelle Perspektiven in Europa und Asien (seit 2010)
In the pre-modern societies of Europe and Asia, the sacral character of objects, spaces and personalities not only needed frequent reaffirmation; it was also open to doubt and even denial. This Research Unit, taking as its starting point the observation that sacrality is only rarely unambiguously defined, and in the vast majority of cases highly controversial and constantly subject to a process of negotiation and renegotiation, will investigate how people approached and dealt with the holy in…
Fundamentaltheologie
Theological interpretation of Scripture
GRK 1718: Presence and Tacit Knowledge
Die Debatte um Präsenz - verstanden als zeitliche und räumliche Gegenwart und Unmittelbarkeit - findet im internationalen Forschungskontext bisher auf die europäische Ideengeschichte beschränkt und dort ins-besondere auf ästhetische Diskurse fokussiert statt. Demgegenüber untersucht das Graduiertenkolleg „Prä-senz und implizites Wissen" in kulturvergleichender Perspektive kulturell divergente Formen der Diskursivie-rung von Präsenz in verschiedenen…
ReReRi-Pilot: Religion as resource and risk. An empirical quantitative study on the religiosity of young refugees
22 refugee pupils in Nürnberg and Leipzig were interviewed on their religiosity and its significance for their flight and their integration.
Holiness adorns your house Discourses on the "beauty of your house, LORD" in the context of sanctification of monastic life
Choosing monasticism as the context of study, we choose a context in which holiness is explicitly postulated as an act of constitution and sacralization as a goal of this specific way of life. It is in the same time the context where the debate on the appropriateness of holy images, which is a central topic in Christian Theology and to be discussed in the context of non-christian dicourses on holy images, is intensified when in the early 12th century Bernard of Clairvaux criticized within the general…
Public Thelogy - Religion - Education
In the Christian context, the calling to contribute to the common good has increasingly been discussed under the label of “public theology”, and has led to the establishment of a “Global Network of Public Theology” (2007). In this discussion, the educational aspect has repeatedly been mentioned, but has remained marginal up to now. Other religions have their own traditions and perspectives, from which responsibility for society is motivated and reflected. The project intends…
ReliBa: Religious educators in Bavaria. A representative survey on Protestant Religious Education at mainstream schools
Empirical research on Protestant Religious Education at Bavarian schools is still rare. This project will provide insight into the experience, attitides and opinions of RE teachers through a representative quantitative survey study. The focus is on the relationship between personal religiosity and teacher professionality as well as on more general questions abouth the significance of RE at Bavarian schools, the relationship of the different professional groups (ministers, church-paid religious…
Publications:
- Ulrich-Eschemann K.:
Ethik im Bild - zeigen, sehen und sprechen als ethisches Handeln
In: Religion lernen : Jahrbuch für konstruktivistische Religionsdidaktik (2013), p. 92-106
BibTeX: Download - Hamilton N.:
"Der Gerechte wird sich freuen [...] und wird seine Füße baden in des Gottlosen Blut." (Ps 58,11). Zum Beten der Rachepsalmen.
In: Evangelische Theologie 77 (2017), p. 282-297
ISSN: 0014-3502
BibTeX: Download - Schoberth W.:
„In Christus wohnt die Fülle der Gottheit leibhaftig“. Zur Auseinandersetzung des biblischen Realismus Oetingers mit dem rationalistischen Schriftverständnis
In: Wort des lebendigen Gottes. Festgabe für Prof. Dr. Reinhard Slenczka zum 60. Geburtstag, Erlangen: Inst. für Systemat. Theologie, 1991, p. 89-98
BibTeX: Download - Schoberth W.:
Das Jenseits der Kunst. Beiträge zu einer wissenssoziologischen Rekonstruktion der ästhetischen Theorie Theodor W. Adornos
Frankfurt / Main u.a.: Peter Lang, 1988
(EHS.Ph, Vol.245)
BibTeX: Download - Schoberth W.:
„Mitten im Leben ..." Systematisch-theologische Bemerkungen zur Wahrnehmung des Todes im Mittelalter
In: Susanne Knaeble, Silvan Wagner, Viola Wittmann (ed.): Gott und Tod. Tod und Sterben in der höfischen Kultur des Mittelalters, Belin: Lit, 2011, p. 291-308 (bayreuther forum TRANSIT - Kulturwissenschaftliche Religionsstudien, Vol.10)
BibTeX: Download