13 May 2011 Deja un comentario
en religiones del Mediterráneo Etiquetas:antropología y religiones, filosofía de las religiones, Judaísmo, JUdaísmo y Europa, mahometismo
Primer capítulo de la serie, producida por la Diputación de Cádiz, El mar de la libertad, en el que se hace un repaso de las civilizaciones que construyeron imperios en torno al Mediterráneo —como los fenicios, los egipcios, los griegos o los romanos—, y sobre todo de las tres religiones monoteístas que surgieron en sus orillas: el judaísmo, el islamismo y el cristianismo.
07 May 2011 Deja un comentario
en investigación sobre religiones
David Berger darf nicht länger Religion unterrichten – offiziell wegen seiner Kritik an der katholischen Kirche. Als wahres Motiv vermutet der Lehrer seine Homosexualität[weiter…]
05. 05. 2011, ZEIT ONLINE
Papst Benedikt hat den polnischen Papst Johannes Paul II. selig gesprochen. Mehr als eine Million Pilger verfolgten den Festakt in Rom. [weiter…]
01. 05. 2011, ZEIT ONLINE
Heute wird Johannes Paul II. selig gesprochen. Dabei gebührt das Himmelreich doch den zurückgesetzten Menschen. Ein Einwand gegen die Seligsprechung von Robert Leicht [weiter…]
28. 04. 2011, DIE ZEIT, Robert Leicht
Ab zur «patriotischen Umerziehung»: Chinesische Polizisten haben ein tibetisches Kloster gestürmt. Mehr als 300 Mönche sollen abtransportiert worden sein. [weiter…]
26. 04. 2011, ZEIT ONLINE
Die kommunistische Führung ist nervös: In Peking sind Dutzende Christen von der Polizei festgenommen und abtransportiert worden. Sie wollten unter freiem Himmel beten. [weiter…]
24. 04. 2011, ZEIT ONLINE
Wie sehen moderne Glaubensstätten aus? Das Fotobuch «Closer to God» zeigt Kirchen, Synagogen, Moscheen in aller Welt – und andere Orte innerer Einkehr. [weiter…]
22. 04. 2011, ZEIT ONLINE
Anfang Juni richtet Dresden den Evangelischen Kirchentag aus, mitten im eher gottlosen Sachsen. [weiter…]
20. 04. 2011, DIE ZEIT, Juliane Schiemenz
Die moderne Ethik liefert viele Vorschläge für den Umgang mit dem, was früher der Teufel hieß oder das Böse. Aber es bleibt ein unerklärter Rest. Von Ulrich Greiner [weiter…]
20. 04. 2011, DIE ZEIT, Ulrich Greiner
Warum James Frey ein drittes Testament schreiben wollte. [weiter…]
20. 04. 2011, DIE ZEIT, Evelyn Finger
Amerikas hoffnungsvollster Skandalautor James Frey schreibt die Bibel fort. Ein Auszug aus seinem neuen Roman «Das Letzte Testament der Heiligen Schrift». [weiter…]
20. 04. 2011, DIE ZEIT, James Frey
Nicht allein auf Bibelfestigkeit kommt es an, sondern ob der alte Gott in die moderne Welt passt. Laien fragen, und Pfarrer antworten [weiter…]
20. 04. 2011, DIE ZEIT, Andreas Horn
Fast alle Religionen der Welt bekennen sich zum Gewaltverzicht, doch die Moral hat sich nicht durchgesetzt. Helmut Schmidt appelliert an religiöse und politische Führer.[weiter…]
14. 04. 2011, DIE ZEIT, Helmut Schmidt
Wie kann ein europäischer Islam entstehen? Der Korangelehrte Bülent Uçar und Bundesministerin Annette Schavan sprechen im Interview über Glauben, Kopftuch und Theologie. [weiter…]
14. 04. 2011, DIE ZEIT, Arnfrid Schenk
Das öffentliche Tragen eines Vollschleiers ist in Frankreich ab jetzt strafbar. Bei einer Demonstration gegen das Verbot wurden Burka-Trägerinnen festgenommen. [weiter…]
11. 04. 2011, ZEIT ONLINE
Etwa 180.000 Katholiken haben 2010 die katholische Kirche verlassen. Das sind gut 50.000 oder 40 Prozent Austritte mehr als im Jahr 2009. [weiter…]
08. 04. 2011, ZEIT ONLINE
07 May 2011 Deja un comentario
en Religiones en Europa, religiones y globalización, religiones y otros asuntos
Talk of the decline of the West repeatedly haunts the media. Its author, Oswald Spengler, on the other hand, seems to be forgotten. Rightly so? On the occasion of the 75th anniversary of his death on May 8, Goethe.de spoke with cultural scientist Johann Pall Arnason.J.P. Arnason is from Iceland and teaches at La Trobe University in Australia. In the spring of 2010 he was at the University of Göttingen to pursue a research project on Oswald Spengler.
Mr Arnason, Spengler’s title “The Decline of the West (Untergang des Abendlandes)” is still proverbial in German, though hardly anyone actually reads the book any more. How do you explain Spengler’s strong indirect influence?
On the one hand, Spengler is regarded as dealt with – certainly for good reasons. On the other hand, we can’t get rid of him. There will always be moods of crisis and decline in which we remember the title of his famous book. In recent years Spengler has even been newly translated, most recently into Czech for the first time. In post-communist states it is probably the disappointment with the capitalist path taken since 1990 that has made his scepticism about civilisation seem relevant again.
Is such a Spengler renaissance dangerous because it supplies thinkers from the extreme Right with key ideas?
That doesn’t really play a part in the scholarly discussion. We shouldn’t eschew Spengler because he was close to the right-wing of the political spectrum.
What was Spengler’s political position?
His political position was quite complex. He didn’t write The Decline of the West as a way of coping with the German defeat in the First World War, as is often assumed abroad. He already had the idea for the book before the war, and indeed he expected a German victory. Then in the 1920s he was in fact a kind of political activist for the radical Right.
Spengler was part of the so-called “Conservative Revolution” – which wasn’t, by the way, a single movement. In the 1932 presidential election he voted for Adolph Hitler, although he didn’t like him. But Spengler wasn’t a pioneer of the Third Reich. After Hitler took power in 1933, Spengler even showed political courage by criticising him in his book The Hour of Decision. After 1934 he went into inner emigration. In his unpublished notes from these years he wrote that Germany was now governed by murderers and compared Hitler to a monkey that had been set down to play a piano.
And he wasn’t read and discussed only by the Conservative Revolution?
Not at all. There are surprising connections in Spengler’s reception. In the 1930s the eminent Finnish philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright and Ludwig Wittgenstein had discussions about him. Wittgenstein’s later use of “forms of life (Lebensformen)”, in which all our language games are embedded, was clearly influenced by his reading of Spengler.
Wittgenstein thought that Spengler should have spoken of the “family resemblances” of cultural phenomena instead of quasi-organic laws. This would have freed Spengler form his own misunderstanding of cultures as self-contained entities that don’t communicate with each another. And between the wars the Icelandic Nobel laureate in literature, Halldór Kiljan Laxness, even propounded a kind of Spenglerian Marxism – that is, interpreted Spengler from a leftist point of view.
Why should we still read Spengler today?
I can think of a number of issues on which Spengler’s thought could have a stimulating effect, without having to warm up again his whole “morphology of world history”. To begin with, critically: Spengler’s idea of self-contained high cultures still haunts the comparative study of civilisations. It is certainly in the background of Samuel Huntington’s theses about the “clash of civilisations”. On the other hand, sociology concerns itself too little about cultural forms of life, not least because of its fixation on the alternative of action or system. There is a deficit. Also not understanding that art and the history of art are significant dimensions of such forms of life, something to which Spengler attached great importance.
And finally there is in current civilisation research, initiated by, for example, Jared Diamond’s well-known book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, a fresh discussion about collapse and failure. Here there’s no way round a critical reception of Spengler’s work.
Any questions about this article? Please write to us!
online-redaktion@goethe.de
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07 May 2011 Deja un comentario
en investigación sobre religiones
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Prof. Dr. Michael von Brück studied at the Universities of Rostock, Bangalore and Madras. His areas of specialisation include Hinduism, Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, and the History and Hermeneutics of Inter-Religious Dialogue, on which he has published numerous writings. In addition to Guest Professorships in India, the U.S.A. and Germany, he was Professor for Comparative Religion at the University of Regensburg from 1988-1991. Since 1991, he has been Professor of Religious Studies and Head of the Inter-Faculty Course of Study in Religious Studies at the University of Munich. Plea for a Politics of Inter-Religious Dialogue   Religions Today |
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Friedrich Wilhelm Graf, PhD. In theology, was born in 1948 in Wuppertal, germany. He studied Protestant theology, philosophy and history at the universities of Wuppertal, Tübingen and Munich, and has been Professor for systematic Theology and ethics at the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität in Munich since 1999. In 1999 he was awarded the Leibniz Prize of the German Association of Higher Studies (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft), the first theologian to receive this award. Prof. Graf is a regular member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften). In 2006/2007 Friedrich Wilhelm Graf is at the Institute for Advanced study in Berlin. Friedrich Wilhelm Graf on the Challenge of the Religions |
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Lamya Kaddor, M.A., is the academic assistant at Germany’s first university chair for the religion of Islam at the Centre for Religious Studies of the University of Münster. She is working as a teacher as part of North-Rhine/Westphalia’s trial phase of “Islamic studies in German”, and is writing a doctoral thesis on “Blood and its significance in Islam” in the field of Islamic theology. Since the 2006/2007 school year, she has been offering further training on behalf of the Culture Ministry of Lower Saxony in the field of “Theory of Islamic Religious Instruction and Theology”. Classes in Islamic Religion and Studies at German Schools |
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Hubert Knoblauch, born in 1959. Professor of General Sociology at the Technical University Berlin. 2000 – 2002 Professor of Religious Sociology at the Zurich University. Focal areas: sociology of knowledge, religious sociology, communication, qualitative methods. Most recent publications:Religionssoziologie. Berlin/ New York 1999;Berichte aus dem Jenseits. Mythos und Realität der Nahtoderfahrung. Freiburg 1999;Qualitative Religionsforschung. Paderborn 2003; Wissenssoziologie. Konstanz 2005.Homepage |
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Professor Claus Leggewie (*1950), professor at the Institute for Political Science at Giessen’s Justus-Liebig University since 1989, founding director of the Centre for Media and Interactivity at the university, project leader in the German Research Foundation’s collaborative research centre «Memory Cultures» and co-head of the German Research Foundation’s Research Training Group «Transnational Media Events». Max Weber Chair at New York University from 1995 to 1997, fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences in Vienna in 1994 and 2006, fellow at the Berlin Institute for Advanced Study in 1999/2000, and director of the Cultural Science Institute in Essen from 2007. Religions and Globalisation Claus Leggewie – Herald of Social Change |
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Detlef Pollack, is a professor for comparative social and cultural studies at the European University Viadrina in Frankfurt (Oder). In 1997 he was a Fellow of theWissenschaftskolleg (Institute for Advanced Study) in Berlin and in 2003 he held the Max Weber Chair at New York University. His research focuses on the sociology of religion, political cultural research, new social movements and system theory. Homepage |
07 May 2011 Deja un comentario
en Religiones en Europa, religiones y otros asuntos, Uncategorized
Young photo artists from Singapore dealt with this topic in a workshop run by Beat Presser. Slide Show Selected Photos The Project
07 May 2011 Deja un comentario
What influence do philosophers still have in our expert-dominated society? Recently Karl Heinz Bohrer and Volker Gerhardt have broached a debate in Merkur, the “German Journal for European Thought”, on what relevance philosophy still has today.In the issue of Merkur published in autumn 2010, Karl Heinz Bohrer addressed a finding that could be a cause of concern in the land of poets and thinkers: Philosophy and the systematic ideas it has formulated have, since the end of the 1970s at the latest, dramatically lost in influence. Where, asks Bohrer, are the great names and the great ideas that command the attention of the times? The post-modern diagnosis of the end of “meta-narratives” seems to have come true. Of philosophy is left only a specialised subject at universities and philosophical essay writing that, though very stimulating, is no longer systematically comprehensive.
If in his reply to this Volker Gerhardt points, not without good reason, to the booming field of Applied Ethics and to the participation of philosophers in ethics boards, that does not address Bohrer’s basic diagnosis. Philosophy certainly does not exercise “power”, even if some of the key principles of the Enlightenment tradition have long found expression in the opinions of the high courts – and so first of all gained real meaning. It is another question of course whether philosophy ever had more “power” than this. Above all, it is doubtful whether the question of influence or even usefulness can arrive at a just appreciation philosophy at all.
It has been part of the philosophy’s understanding of itself from time immemorial that it distances itself from the expectation of providing direct social benefit. Philosophical knowledge has always been an end in itself. Philosophy is desirable for man for its own sake. It is quite in this sense that Gerhardt defends philosophy: “If philosophy were really to confine itself to its ‘social relevance’, then we could safely dispense with it”. For Bohrer, the same applies to the utilisation of philosophy in ethic boards: “A philosophy that has settled into practice or would influence practice forfeits its specifically philosophical character”.
Only by insisting on its independence can philosophy maintain its spirit of contradiction and resist instrumentalisation of any kind. And only then can it be inspiring and “useful” for a free society and its critical public. This need hardly mean, however, that philosophy shut itself up from the outset in an ivory tower standing far above practice. On the contrary, Gerhardt rightly observes that “Lack of interest in social relevance is hardly a mark of quality in philosophy”. Not Plato’s metaphysical contemplation of the Ideas, but rather the practical philosophy of Aristotle would accordingly provide the bearings for independent thought that does not feel itself above a concern for social practice.
Open, democratic societies have no need of philosopher-kings
Against this background, Gerhardt then, quite logically and in the Aristotelian spirit, sings the praises of the diversity of philosophy. Especially in post-metaphysical modernity, with its pronounced social pluralism, there is no longer room for the great systems and projects. Open, democratic societies have no need of philosopher-kings. Making do pragmatically in social practice with the penultimate and the preliminary is quite a civilised achievement. It is therefore not surprising that in his conclusion Bohrer sees in the American liberal John Rawls the philosopher whose work is today “of the highest philosophical-theoretical relevance and, at the same time, of tremendous public significance”. Rawl’s concept of fairness is essential to the political-philosophical self-understanding of pluralist democracies.
For all other, sometimes existentially important questions, notoriously insecure modern man has a great deal of competing answers. Here philosophy, alone because of its long tradition, has much to offer. It does not have a monopoly of interpretation, nor much appreciable “power”; but it does not need these in order to exercise its inspiring influence.
Any questions about this article? Please write to us!
online-redaktion@goethe.de
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en religiones y globalización, religiones y otros asuntos, Uncategorized
07 May 2011 Deja un comentario
en religiones y globalización, religiones y otros asuntos, religiosidad popular
07 May 2011 Deja un comentario
Vajramala (Sabine Thielow) became Director of the Buddhist study and meditation center «Mahakala Ashram,» on the shores of Lake Constance, in 1991 and has been Chairperson of the German Buddhist Union (Deutsche Buddhistische Union, DBU) since 2001.
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