Terms and Perspective
The term “religion” does not refer to a separate sub-sector of society, but to a dimension that transcends human life and coexistence, including ethical and normative principles, existential ties, spiritualities, and the fundamental reasons and ultimate meaning of life. Thus, on the one hand, the term focuses on specific religions in terms of their explicit confessions and teachings, as well as their lived religiosity, social practices, and ritual performance. On the other hand, it addresses the relationship with the unavailable, unconditional and transcendent in a more general way. This can also be applicable in cases where religion is explicitly rejected or replaced by secular interpretations. From this broader perspective, the evolution and transformation of the religious landscape become particularly apparent.
To work with these phenomena and related problems, it is necessary to examine the various forms of community formation and institutionalization through which religion manifests itself tangibly. This aspect is reflected in the term "church." Transformations in the religious field change the social and organizational forms of religion, and vice versa. Different understandings of "church" reflect not only the theological models of thought and ways of faith of 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 crucial for classifying and communicating religion and politics, the individual and community, and faith and knowledge. The opportunities, challenges, and problems of religious institutionalization can be studied using the Catholic Church as an example, as well as other churches and religious communities.
Churches and religious communities do not face "society", but 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 sources. This corresponds to a dynamic understanding of identity, which is neither static nor arbitrarily constructed, but is rather newly created again and again within its historical, social and cultural contexts. The tension between continuity and discontinuity, inertia and transformation, familiarity and foreignness, identification and differentiation, and the conflictual, complex negotiation processes between religion(s) and their various forms of institutionalization and society, in the past and present, open up a wide range of research areas. These areas are approached in an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary manner at the ZRKG.
