Original contributions

In Switzerland and France more than half of the catholic priests are over 75 years old. Yet, according to canon law at this age they usually must leave their pastoral responsibilities and may retreat from their ecclesial life. Facing the perspective of a church without priests, and enhancing a moral discourse in which human dignity and the exemplarity of the clergy entangle, the diocesan organizations have shown only recently a preoccupation about the ageing of their priests. Here, we develop an empirical framework for a sociology of ageing priests that considers the importance of their national and diocesan contexts. Our aim is to review the category of “ageing priests” through its contemporary heterogeneity. We use a grounded theory approach in qualitative sociology to examine different situations of this social category. Our considerations cross theological examples of aging priests in the Catholic Church, the statements of caregivers, and the “lived” heterogeneity of aging priests themselves. We aim to document the current adaptations and new versions of Catholicism after the Second Vatican Council in the light of current gerontological norms that apply to the clergy.

In this commentary, Krech’s article “Religious Contacts in Past and Present Times: Aspects of a Research Program”, originally published in 2012, is placed in the context of several pioneering works that have provided important impulses for a global history of religion. As the article was published as a provisional step, it is of particular value for a reflection on the ongoing challenges of a global history of religion. It is emphasized how the central questions formulated at that time also persist in current discussions, which, however, are predominantly characterized by global and entanglement perspectives and often genealogical approaches. This emphasizes how the methodological repertoire brought into play by Krech can be useful for thinking about global religious history.

Edmund Hardy (1852–1904) was a Catholic priest, Indologist, and religious scholar who lived and worked during the period of the Kulturkampf struggle between the German Chancellor Bismarck and the Catholic church as well as early German colonialism. The lecture he gave under the title “Einleitung in die vergleichende Religionswissenschaft” (“Introduction to Comparative Religion”) at the German University of Freiburg in 1890 and his appointment as professor for “Vergleichende Religionswissenschaft und altindische Literatur” (“Comparative Religion and Ancient Indian Literature”") in 1894 at the Swiss University of Fribourg were key steps in establishing the discipline of Religionswissenschaft (Science of Religion) in the German-speaking world. The essay he wrote in 1898 entitles “Was ist Religionswissenschaft?” (“What is the Science of Religion?”) was perhaps his key statement of the nature of this discipline, which he defines as a strictly empirical Geisteswissenschaft and Kulturwissenschaft (Arts and Humanities). This essay was the first article to appear in the new journal Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, edited by the secondary school teacher Thomas Achelis (1850–1909). Hardy’s approach was methodologically based on historicism and on the early understanding of psychology according to Wilhelm Dilthey and Wilhelm Wundt. However, as similarly befell Joachim Wach’s empirical approach, Hardy’s methodological work was barely noticed during the long reign of the phenomenology of religion. This observation raises fundamental questions of how the history of our discipline has been constructed and, in particular, of what are considered “classics” in the study of religion.

In the course of the academic establishment of the Study of Religion (Religionswissenschaft) as an independent academic discipline in the second half of the 19^th century, the first specialised journals also appeared. In the German-speaking world, the Archiv für Religionswissenschaft, first published in 1898, is of particular importance. Its founder and first editor was the Bremen grammar school teacher Thomas Achelis (1850-1909). The first volume opened – as an editorial – with Edmund Hardy’s (1852-1904) text “Was ist Religionswissenschaft? A Contribution to the Methodology of the Historical Study of Religion”. The following study first places the beginnings of the Archiv für Religionswissenschaft in the context of the history of science, then gives an overview of the most important biographical data of Edmund Hardy and the fundamental aspects of his scientific work. Finally, we will consider the further development of the Archiv für Religionswissenschaft with the transition to the new editorship by Albrecht Dieterich (1866-1908) and finally briefly review the reception of Hardy’s work.

Edmund Hardy (1852-1904) was a Catholic priest, Indologist and religious scholar in times of German Kulturkampf and colonialism. With his lecture “Einleitung in die vergleichende Religionswissenschaft” (“Introduction to Comparative Religion”) at the German University of Freiburg from 1890 and his appointment as professor for “Vergleichende Religionswissenschaft und altindische Literatur” (“Comparative Religion and Ancient Indian Literature”) in 1894 at the Swiss University of Fribourg, the young discipline took its first steps towards academic establishment in the entire German-speaking world under the term Religionswissenschaft (Science of Religion). Especially in his essay “Was ist Religionswissenschaft?” (“What is the Science of Religion?”) from 1898, Hardy defines the discipline as a strictly empirical Geisteswissenschaft and Kulturwissenschaft (humanities and cultural studies), methodologically based on historicism and on the early understanding of psychology according to Wilhelm Dilthey and Wilhelm Wundt. Just as the empirical approach of Joachim Wach, Hardy’s methodological work was hardly noticed in the long period of the phenomenology of religion. This observation leads to the fundamental question of the construction of our disciplinary history and in particular of the so-called “classics” in the study of religion.

With his will from 1901, the Indologist and religious scholar Edmund Hardy (1852-1904) donated a large sum of money to the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities for the annual funding and awarding of Indological research. In its active years from 1905 to 1922 and from 1930 to 1936, the Hardy Foundation supported numerous individual researchers as well as a number of international publication projects. The isolation of German scholarship that accompanied the outbreak of World War I eventually led to a national provincialisation of the foundation.

The article first illuminates the background of the foundation, then the central persons of the committee and finally the funding practice under its changing economic and political conditions.

This study uses social media comments on news reports about the exemption of religious communities in Germany from COVID-19 restrictions as empirical data for researching a contemporary, everyday understanding of religion as suggested by Michael Bergunder (2014). To analyse the discourse on religion, a qualitative content analysis is applied, which pre-structures the corpus. This allows for diverse attitudes towards policies on religion, as well as their correlations to understandings of religion to be identified. The results show that the contested role of religion in society and its relationship to the state is linked to the struggle over the filling of the concept of religion. Finally, a critical assessment following Bergunder’s approach is applied, emphasizing the need to research the current understanding of religion as a contested concept.

Kulturwissenschaftliche Arbeiten befassen sich im Zuge des 21. Jahrhunderts zunehmend mit sozialen Interaktionen zwischen menschlichen und nicht-menschlichen Tieren. Während frühere Publikationen eher die symbolische Bedeutung und den ökonomischen Nutzen von Tieren analysierten, wird derzeit ebenfalls gefragt, ob Tiere Teil der menschlichen Sozialgemeinschaft sind. Im vorliegenden Beitrag wird dargelegt, inwiefern sich auf biologisch-dynamischen Landwirtschaftsbetrieben, die sich im Demeter-Verband zusammenschließen, Tier-Mensch-Beziehungen ergeben, die aus der Innenperspektive als kooperativ und gegebenenfalls freundschaftlich betrachtet werden und weshalb Biodynamiker:innen die Ansicht vertreten, ein Interspezies-Austausch zwischen Mensch und Tier sei möglich. Die Befunde der Studie fußen größtenteils auf einer ethnographischen Feldforschung und semi-strukturierten Interviews. Der Beitrag lotet das Potenzial der Mensch-Tier-Beziehung als zukünftiger Forschungsperspektive im Bereich der Öko-Spiritualität aus und knüpft in diesem Zusammenhang an den Ansatz der Material Religion an.

The articulation of ecology and spirituality has long-time either be ignored or taken for granted. Rarely has it been approached by a constructivist or processual perspective. This text draws on research on public environmentalism in Switzerland since 2015 when an increasing number of appeals to consider ecological issues with spiritual references appeared. While this observation could not be explained simply by the hypothesis of “greening of religions”, the research asked what the social profiles were of the carriers of this articulation? This text presents how the research has explored life courses of environmentalists to reconstruct the way they have articulated their spiritual or moral ideas with ecology or vice versa. It thereby identifies two main groups who have very different positions in the public realm. The aim of this text is to understand how the two fields of religion—in the broadest sense of the word—and ecology, which were previously quite distinct and relatively impervious to each other, have recently been reshaped in relation to each other, particularly around the notion of eco-spirituality. This text adopts a socio-anthropological perspective to describe eco-spirituality not only as an intellectual category invented in theological and philosophical spheres but as entailing a variety of practices, worldviews, and meaning-making processes interweaving ecology and spirituality.

Il contributo si propone di rileggere gli attuali processi di sacralizzazione della natura sullo sfondo di una storia plurisecolare del sacro tipica dell’Occidente che ha portato all’emergere di un sacro secolare distinto da un sacro religioso. Dopo aver riflettuto sul problematico concetto di natura/Natura (par. 2) e accennato alle fasi principali che il sacro ha conosciuto nella tradizione occidentale (par. 3 e 4), l’articolo si sofferma sugli attuali processi di sacralizzazione della natura (par. 5). Essi possono essere di due tipi, a seconda che si richiamino a un sacro religioso, come nel caso delle correnti neopagane che costituiscono una componente importante della spiritualità ecologica, o secolare, come nel caso dell’ambientalismo radicale non religioso.

In 2010, Bron Taylor published his seminal book Dark Green Religion: Nature, Spirituality and the Planetary Future, which rapidly became a “must-read” in the ongoing ecology-religion debates. A decade later, this work gained broader visibility and diffusion with a German translation. This paper aims at introducing the first two chapters of Angelica Federici’s and Eleonora D’Alessandro’s translation in Italian to a European continental audience. It first provides a brief genealogy of the ecology-religion debates and how it structured into an interdisciplinary field of research. Then, it details how the concept of dark green religion is useful for expanding ongoing scholarly discussions. On a more critical note, and from the perspective of social theory, the author suggests two critiques that challenge religious scholars and social scientists to extend current thought and reflection on dark green religion.

Il est extrêmement rare qu’une réflexion sur les relations entre les êtres humains, la religion et la nature ne se réfère pas à la publication de la fameuse thèse de White « The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis » (1967). Les intentions de la contribution de White se voulaient véritablement « programmatiques » en suggérant des réformes de la théologie chrétienne. L’argument de cet article est de souligner que l’historien appelait par sa conférence à une réforme du christianisme, en mettant en lumière sa responsabilité dans la crise environnementale. Pour étayer cette position, nous nous appuierons, au-delà de la thèse de 1967, sur deux autres publications postérieures que nous présenterons dans cet article. Nous relèverons qu’en voulant infléchir la théologie chrétienne, White pensait influencer les valeurs occidentales sur l’écologie. L’ironie du sort est qu’il est bien parvenu à participer à un mouvement de réforme de la théologie, mais la sécularisation a depuis frappé à la porte de l’Occident annulant la potentialité qu’une théologie dissémine des valeurs fondamentales pour la société.

Bron Taylor’s book Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future, published in 2010, remains to be an important resource still today. This article discusses the book in the light of Bron Taylor’s work in the field of religion and ecology, interpreting the “global greening of religion” as a strong movement that is driven by discourse communities, consisting of scholars (both from the humanities and the natural sciences), writers, artists, practitioners of all walks of life, politicians, and environmental activists. After briefly discussing examples from recent literature and fiction, the article reviews some influential tendencies within the field of religion and ecology that followed the publication of Dark Green Religion. Besides further research that tests the book’s main hypotheses, these tendencies include a new interest in animism as a key concept both for practitioners and researchers.