100 years of religious constitutional law
Cluster of Excellence to host public lecture series in summer semester
The Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” is to host in the summer semester the public lecture series “Conditions of Religious Modernity: 100 years of religious constitutional law in Germany”. This interdisciplinary series of lectures will investigate how religious constitutional law has developed in Germany from the Weimar Constitution of 1919 to the present day, but will also illuminate the situation in other countries such as France, Austria and the USA.
The lectures will take place in lecture hall J3 of the Juridicum, Universitätsstraße 14-16, in Münster every Tuesday at 18:15 from 2 April to 9 July. The legal scholar Hinnerk Wißmann will open the series with a lecture entitled “Von Weimar in die Zukunft: Die Zeitenwende ‘1919’ als Konstante des Religionsverfassungsrechts” (From Weimar to the Future: the turning point ‘1919’ as a constant in religious constitutional law).
“2019 is a year of constitutional jubilees. This is not a call to dead history, though, but an opportunity to look at the essential conditions of modernity”, say the organizers. “A direct path of development leads to the present from the Paulskirche in 1849, through the Weimar Constitution in 1919, to the original text of the Basic Law in 1949”.
The lecture series will combine perspectives from constitutional law, history, theology, and the social sciences: How did the regulations of the Weimar articles on the church, which are still valid today as part of the Basic Law, arise? Which questions were solved, and which were left to later practice? Which indirect influences can be proven to impinge on the relationship between religion and politics? How has the view of the regulations changed over time? What is the future of this religious constitutional law in times of dynamic pluralization? (exc/sca)