Research projects at Prof. Yelle's Chair deal with the history of political secularism, the history of the concepts of secularization and religion, as well as the role of religion in the Anthropocene, among other topics. Research is carried out in several forms, among them doctoral theses and habilitations.
Olga Shevchenko
The proposed research is focused on the formation of the contemporary tradition of Jewish pilgrimage to the city of Uman, Ukraine. I am particularly interested in examining and comparing the pilgrims’ views on the meanings of the rituals and practices they perform during their religious travel. The collection and analysis of data will be based on the principles of constructivist ethnography and grounded theory. The ethnographic account of the female pilgrims’ experiences will be of special value due to the scarcity of previous research. The findings of this study are expected to contribute to understanding of the transformations and continuity of the tradition of Jewish pilgrimages.
Mehdi Mirabian Tabar
In Iran, the nineteenth century, which coincided with the reign of the Qajar dynasty, was a period of profound changes in the economy, politics, and culture. The seeds of constitutional thought in Iran were also sown in the early nineteenth century when a group of intellectuals introduced modern concepts and ideas—such as the rule of law, limited monarchy, freedom, and equality—to the country. The main objective of the constitutional movement was to curtail the Shah’s absolute power by making a set of laws modeled after European ones—that is, a state based on rule of law. This was not something that could be easily accomplished for two reasons: First, the Shah opposed any limitations on his absolute power; And second, the Shi῾ite clerics considered the idea of law making to be contrary to Islam. However, what made the situation worse for the constitutionalists was the collaboration between the shahs and the Shi῾ite clerics, which had its roots in the Safavid period (1501-1736) and reached its peak during the Qajar period. With the gradual expansion of constitutional thought in Iran, this collaboration turned into a coalition that opposed constitutionalism and advocated the old regime. This study aims to investigate this coalition as a theologico-political obstacle to the establishment of modern state in Iran: a state based on laws originated from the unassisted human reason in a community governed by God’s law and His sovereign will.
English title: Theological criticisms of the Hindu sacrificial religion by English missionaries in 19th-century north India
This doctoral research project enquires into the significance of the religious category of "sacrifice" in the discourse of the English Protestant missionaries in nineteenth-century north India. The main argument is that the missionaries held a much older anti-sacrificial theology which can be traced back to the first theological treatises of the Church, and which was applied to sacrificial ideology and rituals during acrimonious disputes with Hinduism, which was regarded as a monolithic belief system. Three main aspects will be investigated: (1) how the missionaries expressed their views on the Roman Catholic understanding of the Eucharist as a sacrifice; (2) how they negatively perceived the sacrificial religion and rituals of Hinduism; (3) how the sacrifice-related, liturgical, and priestly terminology in the New Testament book Epistle to the Hebrews was translated by three of these missionaries into Sanskrit in the two versions of the Sanskrit Bible from 1808 and 1848/1851. Towards this end, research into the theological and cultural heritage of the missionaries, which one finds in their works, newspaper articles, letters, reports, among other sources, will be undertaken.
English title: On the Intention and Effects of Schleiermacher's Plato
In my dissertation, I am investigating Schleiermacher's Plato translation project in regard to its intention and its effects. In no way is this a philological critique of the translation; rather, it is the hermeneutical-critical introductions which Schleiermacher wrote for the Platonic dialogues which are in focus. Four interconnected topics take centre stage:
Chandra Chiara Ehm's doctoral research "Yellow Hats, Indian Pandits, and Practice in the Geluk Order" focuses on scholasticism in Buddhist monastic communities and how these encounter processes of social change, modernization, and secularization affect them in direct and indirect ways. In her doctoral research, the approach is interdisciplinary and comparative. She aims to combine a philological skillset with philosophical texts, particularly the Abhisamayālaṅkāra, with fieldwork in contemporary monastic communities in Tibet, Nepal, and India.
Dr. Sabine Exner-Krikorian
English title: The Right to Love: a Discursive Analysis of Same-Sex Marriage in Germany
In her dissertation, Sabine Exner-Krikorian examines the discourse around same-sex marriage in Germany from 1998 to 2017. For this, she augments the approach of discursive religious studies with the social-constructivist theoretical premises and analytical tools of the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse (SKAD), developed by Reiner Keller. It will be shown in detail how the participants in this negotiation process around the interpretation of marriage use the premises of an assumed modernity, the religious/secular dichotomy and narratives of and about religion(s) as discursive strategies, and use an opposition between religious opponents and secular proponents as an attribution of "self" and "other". The thesis makes a fundamental contribution to the research of contemporary battles to interpret cultural concepts, which take place under conditions of an assumed modernity and its discourse-structuring creation of an opposition between religious and secular.
Dr. habil. Olga Havenetidis
English title: La victime elle-même. The Rider on the White Horse and Madame Bovary reflected in Durkheim's sketch of religion in Le suicide. A critical appropriation
In his study Le Suicide, Émile Durkheim applies his sociological methods to the topic of suicide. According to Durkheim, suicide rates serve as indicators of a society's overall "temperature" and can be classified into three types: egoistic, altruistic, and anomic. In his analysis of egoistic suicide, Durkheim considers the relationship between religious affiliation and suicide rates, noting that Protestant societies exhibit significantly higher suicide rates than Catholic ones. Durkheim interprets this pattern based on his views on the integrity of religious communities, suggesting that life and daily practices in Catholic societies are more deeply embedded in community and ritual, whereas individuals in Protestant societies tend to be more isolated.
The terms Durkheim develops in this analysis are used in the habilitation thesis as parameters for reading Storm's Der Schimmelreiter and Flaubert's Madame Bovary—a juxtaposition of three highly distinct texts that draws on Warburg's principle of "good neighborliness". The methodology is additionally a religious-aesthetic approach that treats all three texts as equals, revealing the disintegration of the social bond in the 19th century.
English title: Secularization and History at the Limits of Religion
In the field of critical secularism studies, an interest in a genealogical concept of secularization has been emerging for some time (for instance in the works of Talal Asad and Gil Anidjar), in order to explore secular discourses and practices as a continuation of religious-theological distinctions and narratives no longer recognised as such because they have been secularized. In this debate, strongly influenced by postcolonialism and reference to Islam and the question of the relatiions between religions, there are repeated references to an older, primarily German-language discussion about the modern age and secularized eschatology (for example in Karl Löwth, Hans Blumenberg, Rudolf Bultmann, Wolfhart Pannenberg), which played an important role, particularly in the years after the Second World War, but which died down in the 1970s. Important for the current debate is the question of whether "Protestantism" produced ideas and practices of religion which make it harder to understand other religions. While the older debate about secularization, modernity and Christianity is proving itself to be extraordinarily productive for the current discussion of the category of the secular, historical references and "indeterminacies" (Blumenberg) in the older debate have barely come into view.
In terms of genealogy and the history of ideas, the current critique of the category of the secular and its challenges for an understanding of other religions can be traced back to debates in the context of historicism and history of religion in the period around the First World War, as well as to a critique, beginning in the late 19th century, of an assumption in theology and history of philosophy that the Kingdom of God would be achieved and realised in the history of the world. The project combines perspectives from the history of discourse and ideas on the connection between secularization and history of religion with a sociological reflection, inspired by Niklas Luhmann, on distinctions in the secularization discourse. In addition to the religious/secular distinction, "culture" and "history" will be explored as frameworks for reflecting on and describing religion, as well as the afterlife of the secularization debate in discussions of climate change and contemporary protest movements.
English title: Navigation: Spiritual Identity in an Interreligious World
How is spiritual identity formed in a globalized and hence interreligious world? What do the changes mean for individuals as well as for religious organizations? This empirical study pursues this question through fieldwork in four metropolises which differ culturally and religiously: Munich, Seoul, Vilnius, and New York City. One result which emerges is that spiritual identity is life-path navigation.
This monograph traces the history of one of the most prominent types of geographical myths of the North-West Atlantic Ocean: transmarine otherworlds of blessedness and immortality. Taking the mythologization of the Viking Age discovery of North America in the earliest extant account of Vínland (‘Wine-Land’) and the Norse transmarine otherworlds of Hvítramannaland (‘The Land of White Men’) and the Ódáinsakr/Glæsisvellir (‘Field of the Not-Dead’/‘Shining Fields’) as its starting point, the book explores the historical entanglements of these imaginative places in a wider European context. It follows how these Norse otherworld myths adopt, adapt, and transform concepts from early Irish vernacular tradition and Medieval Latin geographical literature, and pursues their connection to the geographical mythology of classical antiquity. In doing so, it shows how myths as far distant in time and space as Homer’s Elysian Plain and the transmarine otherworlds of the Norse are connected by a continuous history of creative processes of adaptation and reinterpretation. Furthermore, viewing this material as a whole, the question arises as to whether the Norse mythologization of the North Atlantic might not only have accompanied the Norse westward expansion that led to the discovery of North America, but might even have been among the factors that induced it.