Theology Research News

During the recent Liberation Theology Workshop: Doing Climate Justice (October 22-24, 2020), Dr. Sebastian Salaske (University of Osnabrück) delivered a presentation on how acknowledging, agreeing upon, and adhering to limits can “do climate justice” and, what is more, have truly liberating effects.

Salaske suggests that while it’s important to bring back a discussion about limits, we must realize that instead of reducing the quality of life, a sufficiency-oriented perspective could in fact have liberating effects. In his presentation, Salaske draws on two theories from the field of interdisciplinary sustainability research which explicitly look at such limits. The first is “consumption corridors”, described by Antonietta Di Giulio and Doris Fuchs. This theory attempts to integrate the good life and justice in sustainable development between the bounds of minimum human requirements and maximum environmental thresholds. The second theory, developed by Niko Paech, entails thinking of sustainable development as a program for economic reduction and necessarily coupled with sharing and self-production. Both these approaches, coupled with the theological insights of Jon Sobrino and Pope Francis, hold great promise for engendering a civilization of shared austerity that, counterintuitively, results in a liberation of both people and planet.

Salaske is Academic Assistant for Dogmatics and Fundamental Theology at the Institute for Catholic Theology of the University of Osnabrück, Germany.

You are provided with the opportunity to witness his presentation by means of a video

ESD, which is based upon a close link between ecological, social, and economic issues, presents a possible structure for rethinking religious education on climate change. Perhaps not coincidentally, the present corona crisis, which has visible and frightening economic and social effects, presents an opportunity for religious educators and institutions to grow past traditional and ineffective problem-solving processes and embrace the new opportunity represented by ESD.

The ESD approach, however, due to ideological presuppositions, must be critically received in order to be fruitfully enacted within a religious environment. In this presentation, Gärtner shares thoughts and suggestions about opportunities for a renaissance of new political-religious education for adolescents. She places special focus on two questions: (1) the extent to which Christianity can introduce critical-political impulses into religious education in a way that motivates young people to act sustainably and keep sight of structural political dimensions, and (2) the extent to which a specifically religious logic can be considered legitimate in a world marked by ideological plurality.

Gärtner is Professor of Practical Theology at TU Dortmund University. Her research focuses on Religious Education and Didactics. In recent years, she has concentrated, in particular, on fundamental issues of Religious Education as well as on the Didactics of Images and of Church History. She is currently conducting research projects on Teaching Methodology in Developmental research and work with youth organisations in day schools.

You are provided with the opportunity to witness her presentation by means of a video

Galadza is currently Fellow of the University of Regensburg’s Jenseits der Kanon (Beyond the Canon) project. His research focuses on the historical development of liturgy, particularly the Byzantine Rite, as well as modern and contemporary Orthodox and Eastern Catholic worship and church singing.

Wiersma is Associate Professor of Religion at Augsburg University in Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA. His work includes the second edition of James Kittelson’s Luther the Reformer: the Story of the Man and His Career (2016) and articles and chapters in volumes such as The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion (2017).

Van Geest is Professor of Church History at Tilburg University and Professor of Economics and Theology at Rotterdam University. He unites in his person the cooperation, with regard to research and education, of both universities in the field of the Latin and Greek church fathers, in particular of Augustine.

Peter Nissen is Full Professor at the Radboud Universiteit Nijmegen. His research mainly focuses on the diversity – both historical and present – within Christianity as a world religion and on the relations between the different Christian currents. He is highly interested in the interaction between traditional and modern forms of religiosity and spirituality. He particularly pays attention to thanatology, that is the scientific study of the practices and beliefs surrounding death.

Peter Gemeinhardt is Full Professor and Chair of Church History at the Faculty of Theology of the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. He is Director of the Collaborative Research Centre Education and Religion in Cultures of the Mediterranean and Its Environment from Ancient to Medieval Times and to the Classical Islam. As such, he has edited several volumes, such as Teachers in Late Antique Christianity (2018) and Was ist Bildung in der Vormoderne? (forthcoming). He is also the author of a translation and commentary of Athanasius’ Vita Antonii (2018).

Maricel Ibita is a KU Leuven alumna (PhD in 2015). Her research interests include narrative, poetry, and metaphor studies in the Bible; the use of the Old Testament in the New Testament; women in the Bible; liberation, social science, and ecological hermeneutics; and the interdependence between Jewish and Christian sources for biblical interpretation. She is currently Assistant Professor at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines.

That temptation is to seek to cure the ills it has inflicted in the world in a way that assuages the aggressors’ conscience while not recognizing the permanent violence it has wrought upon the victims. Instead, Christian theologians, particularly those who are heirs of European hegemony, should pray to be “haunted” by figures of social memory of marginalized communities.

The result, Gruber maintained, will be a situation in which theologians stand between death and life, guilt and justice, suffering and redemption, and, most importantly, between a history of suffering and a future of hope. In that place, we enter into a “perpetual critical mourning” that results in salvation—a salvation born out of a recognition that God’s salutary presence is irretrievably entangled in the world. The speech was delivered on Friday, April 5, 2019.