On May 22, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinscahft (DFG), together with the Council of Sciences, announced which departments of excellence at German universities would receive federal funding for the seven-year period 2026-2033. Since then, the failure to renew funding for the Department of Excellence “Religion and Politics” at the University of Münster – active since 2007 with […]
Pope Leo will have to face the delicate issue of China, yet he may want to see how the problem is perceived in Beijing. Here is a summary. One of the most delicate topics Pope Leo will have to address is undoubtedly China. The meticulous Vatican diplomacy will surely be able to tell him every […]
On May 20 (375), the Council of Nicaea began, which would than define the divinity of Jesus and the Trinitarian dimension of the Christian God. Heiner Wilmer, Catholic bishop of Hildesheim (Germany), shows how significant ideas for restoring strength and substance to our democracies in crisis are hidden in the structural folds of this Christological […]
Religion as a political tool – The Russian Church is tying a knot with the Serbian Church to draw Belgrade closer to Moscow There is a moment during the triumphant visit of Patriarch Porfirije of Belgrade to Moscow (April 21-26) where any openness toward the “social revolution” sparked by Serbian students on November 1, 2024—following […]
The Ukrainian war seeps into the faith of non-Russian countries as Moscow’s orthodoxy is feared as a trojan horse of Putin’s disruptive intentions On February 19, the Estonian Parliament approved in its first reading a law aimed at preventing the use of the pro-Russian Church for anti-state purposes. The law establishes the illegality of a […]
The “force of reason” and the “reason of force” have been central to the relationship between ideology/religion and political/military power in Europe and the Mediterranean—and later the world—for millennia. The combined strength of the Aristotelian argument and the Macedonian phalanx enabled not only the rapid conquests of Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC […]
The history of Jesus is also that of walking a very fine line—a radical critique of the Roman imperial order (intertwining religious and political power) without aiming to topple or replace the Empire. Jesus contrasts the deification of the emperor with the presence of God in a marginal Jewish “prophet’s” everyday life. The two can […]
