Courses, Lectures, and Seminars

Religion and state have been two separate cultural spheres in democratic constitutional states for quite some time, mutually complementing and influencing each other. Pluralism, secularism, and individualism characterize the postmodern societies of the West. Nevertheless, most socio-ethical problems lie on a political level and must therefore be reflected by social ethics. Social ethics even defines itself as a Christian ethics that seeks to solve transsubjective moral problems on a structural level. Therefore, this lecture not only deals with the relationship between church and state but rather with the best possible design of state organizations in our time. In order to achieve this within the framework of a pluralism-capable social ethics, theories of the good life, like religion, must be put into an appropriate relationship with generalizable theories of justice that are and should be decisive for the shaping of modern politics. This also includes considering the interactions of a modern concept of democracy with the foundation of a Christian ethics.

Digital Reading Seminar with Excursion to a Block Course: The connection between ethics and law is often unclear, depending on how lawyers understand the law. We can see this in the current history of the interpretation of Article 1 of the German Basic Law, in which human dignity is also enshrined in accordance with the Christian tradition. However, it is sometimes interpreted constitutionally analogously to this, at other times according to the tradition of Immanuel Kant, and more recently even as an "empty concept." The question is also how dignity has been defined by Christian ethics throughout its history and what Christian ethics expects from a democratic constitutional state to be preserved from this tradition. Furthermore, the concept of dignity has been incorporated into human rights, and here too the question is what it entails in terms of legal ethics. To work this out in ethical research is the task of the participants in this seminar.

This seminar is particularly geared towards students writing their theses or dissertations in the CSW. The topics covered in the seminar will be tailored to their respective projects.

Christian ethics is no longer unchallenged. A variety of innovative trends with ethical claims seek to maintain interpretive hegemony in the open societies of the West. For several decades, there have also been postmodern ethical concepts for normative ethics: these range from post structuralism, the philosophy of alterity, and the philosophy of identity to approaches of libertarian individualism. An ethics with a clear Christian profile and a two-thousand-year tradition has a hard time convincing people here. It must decide whether to adopt woke approaches that are currently en vogue. But it must also decide whether it can still convince its own believers with its traditional methods of justification in ethics. Therefore, we want to acquire a competence that enables us to justify a Christian ethics that can convince both internally and externally. This means finding the balance between traditions and innovations without losing one's own profile. This is our challenge."

This seminar will explore the foundations of economic ethics from the macro level (economic order ethics) to the meso level (corporate ethics) and the micro level (employee, leadership, and consumer ethics). What is the purpose of the economy? By what criteria should economic practice be measured? Finally, we will examine the scandals surrounding German dioceses and the Vatican Bank. How can the Church invest ethically?