Terms and Perspective
The term "religion” does not refer to a separate sub-sector of society, but to a dimension that transcends human life, coexistence and cultures, that includes ethical-normative principles and their derivation, existential ties and spiritualities, fundamental reasons and ultimate meaning in life. Thus, on the one hand, the term focuses on specific religions – in their explicit confessions and teachings as well as in their lived religiosity and their religious practices. On the other hand, it addresses the relationship to the unavailable, unconditional and transcendent in a more general way, which can also still be addressed in cases where religion is explicitly rejected or secular interpretations take its place. In this expanded perspective, change and transformation of the religious field become particularly evident.
In order to work with these phenomena and related problems, it is necessary to look at the various forms of community formation and institutionalization in which religion manifests itself in tangible form. This aspect is mirrored in the term "church". The transformations of the religious field change the social and organizational forms of the religious and vice versa. The different understandings of "church" not only reflect the different ways of faith and theological models of thought of the religions and denominations, but also the cultural patterns of interpretation, social forms of organization and political models of a cultural area and time.
Religion as an organizational form is of crucial importance for the classification and communication of religion and politics, of individual and community, and of faith, knowledge and science. Opportunities, challenges and problems of religious institutionalization can be researched using the example of the Catholic Church, but not exclusively.
Churches and religious communities do not simply face "society", but at the same time form a part of it: They take part in social transformation processes and also influence them. Religion takes place in this larger social context, shapes it and is shaped by it. The term "society" aims at this space of interaction that is comprehensive and segmented, spatially and diachronically-historically differentiable at the same time and which can be approached and examined from its historical, socio-cultural as well as political side. The scientific debate about the role of religion in society, about its forms of institutionalization and ultimately about the task of theology in the scientific sphere has always been and still is related to more far-reaching processes of social transformation in their local, regional, continental and global forms.
The three terms religion, church, and society outline the main subject areas of the work at the ZRKG, which is always approached involving the aspect of "change". This formal perspective can be specified further with the concept of transformation. It is not only generally about changes that are constantly taking place in history, but primarily about those more fundamental processes of change that affect access to reality, the form of world appropriation and the formative patterns of interpretation on a collective level: The same thing is seen from a different perspective. This applies to changes in ways of thinking, language, communication, life, social and legal forms. Neither individuals nor societies can permanently evade such transformation processes. They must be reflected as a formative task as well as in their personal, social and political implications. The task is to accentuate the indispensable and permanently valid aspects of this change anew by re-reading, reappraising and appropriating existing traditions by going back to their original roots. This corresponds to a dynamic understanding of identity, which is neither static nor arbitrarily constructed, but is rather newly created time and again within its historical, social and cultural contexts. The tension between continuity and discontinuity, between inertia and transformation, between familiarity and foreignness, between identification and the ability to differentiate, but also the conflictual and complex negotiation processes between religion and its various forms of institutionalization and society in the past and present open up a wide range of research areas, which are approached in an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary manner at the ZRKG.