Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften
Fellow Programme of the LOEWE Research Center »Religious Positioning« established at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften

»Religiöse Positionierung: Modalitäten und Konstellationen in jüdischen, christlichen und islamischen Kontexten« (Religious Positioning: Modalities and Constellations in Jewish, Christian and Islamic Contexts) is the name of the new LOEWE research initiative that was officially launched in June 2017 at Goethe University. The goal of this research project is to look at the currently observable religious and cultural pluralization in society and examine how the broad, monotheistic religions – Judaism, Christianity and Islam – have dealt and are now dealing with religious diversity and difference. Professor Christian Wiese, chair of the research center, explains that the starting assumption is that »religions are basically positional and thus prone to conflict but not therefore necessarily incapable of pluralism. Instead they are capable of respecting and taking differences seriously.« Wiese is the Martin Buber Professor of Jewish Religious Philosophy at Goethe University as well as Goethe Fellow at the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg.














This broad and interdisciplinary research center will be funded by the state of Hessen within the research funding programme LOEWE (Landesoffensive zur Entwicklung wissenschaftlich-ökonomischer Exzellenz – state initiative for the development of academic-economic excellence) with the amount of 4.5 million Euro from 2017 to 2020. The center comprises 13 sub-projects that are located at Goethe University in Frankfurt and Justus Liebig University in Gießen.

One component of the research programme is the establishment of a Center for Advanced Studies (CAS) in cooperation with the Forschungskolleg Humanwissenschaften in Bad Homburg. At the invitation of the LOEWE research center, external scholars will be able to live and work here in order to contribute their expertise to the research project in the form of lectures, workshops and colloquia. About four junior fellows and one senior fellow will be invited to the institute during the project.

The first LOEWE fellow at the institute is Markus Buntfuß, professor for systematic theology at the Augustana Theological Seminary in Neuendettelsau. During his two-month fellowship in the summer semester 2017, he will be dealing with the internal and external positioning of the three Abrahamic religions in the public sphere from the perspective of the aesthetics of religion.