“Deep Religious Grammar”
Book presentation on the denominational influence on welfare-state key concepts in Germany
In a public book launch hosted by the University of Münster’s Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” and the Center for Religion and Modernity (CRM), social ethicists Prof. Dr Karl Gabriel and Prof. Dr Hans-Richard Reuter will present research results regarding the denominational influence on welfare-state key concepts in Germany. The scholars edited the anthology “Religion und Wohlfahrtsstaatlichkeit in Deutschland. Konfessionen – Semantiken – Diskurse” (Religion and the Welfare State in Germany. Denominations – Semantics – Discourses), which was published through publishing house Mohr Siebeck in 2017. The presentations will be commented on by sociologist and Protestant theologian Prof. Dr Günter Brakelmann from Ruhr-Universität Bochum and Catholic theologian and economist Prof. Dr Friedhelm Hengsbach from the Catholic Academy Rhein-Neckar in Ludwigshafen. The book will be presented on Thursday, 28 June 2018, 6.15 pm at the University of Münster’s Faculty of Catholic Theology, seminar room KTh I, Johannisstraße 8-10.
It applies to Germany in particular that its tradition of a corporatist social security state with dual welfare care cannot be understood without taking into account the religious factor, as the editors explain. In an integration of conceptual historical and sociological approaches to knowledge, they analyse the reference of religious actors to welfare-state key semantics in Germany since the German Empire in its denominational character. The book “Religion und Wohlfahrtsstaatlichkeit in Deutschland. Konfessionen – Semantiken – Diskurse” was published by Mohr Siebeck in November 2017.
On the one hand, the authors analyse institutional semantics, characterised by terms such as “state”, “economy”, “work” and “poverty”, and on the other hand, they analyse value semantics, which find expression in terms such as “justice”, “solidarity” and “security”. The contributions show how the struggle for the world of the social takes place in the semantic field between denominations as well as between religious and secular actors. They open up a view of the religious dimension of the “deep grammar of the German welfare state”.
The volume results from the Cluster of Excellence’s research project A7 The Religious Deep Grammar of the Social. Karl Gabriel and Hans-Richard Reuter are members of CRM and emeritus professors at the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics”. In 2013, together with the theologians Andreas Kurschat and Stefan Leibold, the two scholars had already published the volume “Religion und Wohlfahrtsstaatlichkeit in Europa. Konstellationen – Kulturen – Konflikte” (Religion and the Welfare State in Europe. Constellations – Cultures – Conflicts). Religious-denominational influences on the development of the welfare state in thirteen European countries from industrialisation to the present age were analysed in this publication. (Mohr Siebeck/maz)