»… dann wird Gott dich mit großen Plagen und bösen Krankheiten heimsuchen« (Dtn 28,59)

Catastrophes like global pandemics are very prone to generate different interpretations, also in the realm of religion and theology. It might be expected that the most common approach within the history of religion was to think of them as divine punishments for human sins. While this was the case in some instances, a closer look, however, reveals that ancient and medieval theologians were very reluctant to embark on that way of explanations and offered more theologically mature thoughts.

THE PERFORMANCE OF SILENCE IN EARLY CHINA: THE YANZI CHUNQIU AND BEYOND

This article looks beyond the dichotomy between silence (mo 默) and speech (yan 言) and discusses the functions of and attitudes toward silence in the Yanzi chunqiu 晏子春秋 as a case representing the variety of ideas of silence in early China. In the West, silence has been widely explored in fields such as religion and theology, linguistic studies, and communication and literary studies. The consensus has moved away from viewing silence as abstaining from speech and utterance—and therefore absence of meaning and intention, toward seeing it as a culturally dependent and significant aspect of communication. However, beyond a number of studies discussing unspoken teachings in relation to early Daoism, silence has received little attention in early China studies. This article approaches the functions of silence by pursuing questions regarding its rhetorical, emotive, political, and ethical aspects. Instead of searching for the nature of silence and asking what silence is, this article poses alternative questions: How do ancient Chinese thinkers understand the act of silence? What are the attitudes toward silence in early China? How does silence foster morality? How does silence function as performative remonstrance? How is it used for political persuasion? How does silence draw the attention of and communicate with readers and audiences? How does silence allow time for contemplation, reflection, and agreement among participants? How is silence related to various intense emotional states? These questions lead us to reflect on previous scholarship which regarded silence in early China as the most spontaneous and natural way to grasp the highest truth, which is unpresentable and inexpressible through articulated speech and artificial language. In this sense, the notion of the unspoken teaching is not only understood in opposition to speech, but also as a means to reveal the deficiency of language and the limits of speech. However, through a survey of dialogues, stories, and arguments in Yanzi chunqiu, I show that silence is explicitly marked and explained within the text, and is used actively, purposefully, and meaningfully, to persuade, inform, and motivate audiences. In other words, silence is anything but natural and spontaneous. Rather, it is intentionally adopted, carefully crafted, and publicly performed to communicate, remonstrate, criticize, reveal, and target certain ideas. That is to say, silence is as argumentative as speech and as arbitrary as language. Finally, an awareness of and sensitivity to silence provides a new perspective to engage with other early Chinese texts.

Grading Rage in the Pastoral Care Classroom

Assessment and grading can elicit rage on the part of both learners and teachers. Can rage lead to creative transformation of classroom cultures to support students in achieving learning goals? Can rage sharpen pedagogical commitments? The author reviews a critical incident of unexpected grading rage that emerged in her once a week three-hour masters level introductory pastoral care classroom, what she did about it in the moment, and how three strategies she employed could be helpful for teaching and learning religion and theology more broadly. When grading rage emerges in the pastoral care classroom and beyond, teaching and learning misunderstanding stories, facilitated by neutral questions in charged contexts, can make room for creative transformation when supported by third voices.

Seeking a Pedagogy of Honesty

With multiple cultural, academic, and religious forces urging students and faculty to default to varying degrees of academic and personal dishonesty, we need to seriously consider how the structures we implement as educators can either reinforce or undermine those urges. After briefly considering some of the varieties of academic dishonesty we face in our religion and theology classrooms, this essay proposes one alternative model for a flow of communication that short-circuits usual expectations and encourages an ethos of honest participation. The proposed solution, called a Discussion Plan, represents an attempt to make the classroom’s center of gravity the honest questions, honest observations, honest confusions, honest exasperations that are uniquely relevant to the actual students of the particular class. This intentional dismantling of regimes of dishonesty with a pedagogy of honesty requires vulnerability and the hard work of active engagement but pays off with richer student participation and creativity.

Reply to my critics

This reply to my five generous and insightful critics – Gianna Englert, David Williams, Alexandra Oprea, Geneviève Rousslière, and Brandon Turner – focuses on three key issues they raise: the relationship of past ideas to present politics, the utility of ideological labels in the history of political thought, and the relationship of political philosophy to religion and theology.

Religion & Theology with Gerhard van den Heever

Gerhard van den Heever presents the history of the journal Religion & Theology, from its start as an in-house theological journal for the University of South Africa to its current frame as an international publication for the transdisciplinary study of religion and theology as discourse formation. Van den Heever presents insights into the journal’s management and shares insights for those interested in submitting their research.

Praktisk teologi i ny skepnad

The article takes its starting point in the return of Practical Theology as a specialization at the Faculty of Theology at Uppsala University in 2020, half a century after the discipline was replaced by ecclesiology. The question that the author wishes to answer is how the return may be interpreted. The return of Practical Theology has to do with a reform of both study programmes and organization of research at the faculty, resulting in a new research subject called Empirical-Practical Studies of Religion and Theology. Practical Theology is one of two specializations within the new subject area, the other being Sociology of Religion. Both specializations are possible to study with a profile in Didactics of Religion. The empirical turn in theology and humanities at large is a major driving force behind the creation of the new research subject. Lived religion and lived theology are increasingly at the forefront of studies in Sociology of Religion as well as in Ecclesiology, two former research subjects that now are merged. What unites the previously separate disciplines is a common interest in theories and methods for studying practices in a new multireligious Swedish context, where traditional confessional and religious boundaries are increasingly blurred. The special contribution of Practical Theology is the theological perspective, which consciously brings issues related to belief in God into the discussion.

The “absolute I” and the “absolute” in the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte

The article deals with the relationship between the concepts of the “absolute I” and “absolute” in the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the relationship of the latter with faith and religion. These concepts play the role of the principle of his philosophy in the early and late period of his work, respectively. The topic of the article is relevant to the issues of religion and theology, first of all, in the sense that in the tradition of interpretation of Fichte’s doctrine, the following two ideas are fixed. First, the principle of the “absolute I” is interpreted as subjective-idealistic, which is why Fichte in the early period of his work had to place the object of faith outside and above knowledge. Second, many researchers are of the view that in his later years, Fichte proceeds to a religious motivated philosophizing that finds expression in his doctrine to change the principle of the “absolute I” with the principle of “absolute”, which is the philosophical equivalent to the concept of God. In the first part of the article, based on the texts of Fichte himself, the unsatisfactoriness of these ideas and the identity of the content of the concepts of the “absolute I” and “absolute” in Fichte are shown. Further, it is demonstrated that the identical content of these concepts is the unconditional first cause of both being and cognition. From the beginning of his work, Fichte sought to understand the true nature of the original and thereby reveal his own definiteness of the subject of religious faith. According to Fichte, his philosophy should overcome the limitations of the theological teachings that preceded it in questions about the essence of the first cause, divine creation and the possibility of its knowledge, and therefore, in fact, represents the experience of creating a new theology.