A superb collection of contemporary research on German-language religious education. Professor Julian Stern, Bishop Grosseteste University, Lincoln, UK Although specific contexts differ between and within countries, the issues and challenges regarding religious education in schools are essentially the same worldwide. It is therefore very valuable and relevant that this volume makes the rich insights and approaches to religious education developed and brought together by German scholars ava...

Schweitzer’s goal in this book is to explore what postmodernity actually means for theology and how theology and the church may respond to its challenges. He focuses on the life cycle as it is changing with the advent of postmodernity, looking sequentially at segments of the life cycle using different lenses: modernity, postmodernity, and responses from church and theology. Schweitzer concludes with a theology of the life cycle.

Originally published in German, Christoph Wulf's Anthropology sets its sights on a topic as ambitious as its title suggests: anthropology itself. Arguing for an interdisciplinary and intercultural approach to anthropology that incorporates science, philosophy, history, and many other disciplines, Wulf examines—with breathtaking scope—all the ways that anthropology has been understood and practiced around the globe and through the years.Seeking a central way to understand a...

Niklas Luhmann is recognised as a major social theorist, and his treatise on the sociology of law is a classic text. For Luhmann, law provides the framework of the state, lawyers are the main human resource for the state, and legal theory provides the most suitable base from which to theorize on the nature of society. He explores the concept of law in the light of a general theory of social systems, showing the important part law plays in resolving fundamental problems a society may face. ...

This book provides an introduction to the basic principles of discourse research, offering practical research strategies for doing discourse analyses in the social sciences. The book includes guidance on developing a research question, selecting data and analyzing it, and presenting the results. The author has extensive practical experience in the field of discourse research and shows, throughout, how the methods suggested are compatible with numerous research questions and problems in soc...

This open access book describes methods for research on and research through design. It posits that ethnography is an appropriate method for design research because it constantly orients itself, like design projects, towards social realities. In research processes, designers acquire project-specific knowledge, which happens mostly intuitively in practice. When this knowledge becomes the subject of reflection and explication, it strengthens the discipline of design and makes it more open to...

How are natures and animals integrated inclusively into research projects through Multispecies Ethnography? While preceded by a vision that seeks to question holistically how scientists can integrate natures and animals into research projects through Multispecies Ethnography, this book focuses on inter- and multidisciplinary collaboration. From an examination of the interfaces between social and natural science-oriented disciplines, a complex view of natures, humans, and animals emerges. T...

This book offers a concise overview of the development of intercultural philosophy since the early 1990s, focusing on one of its key pioneers Heinz Kimmerle (1930– 2016).Building on influences from Gadamer, Heidegger, Derrida and Ramose, Kimmerle’s approach to intercultural philosophy is radical and fosters epistemic justice. Kimmerle critically reflected on his own western philosophical tradition, highlighting the problems of a discourse based on a dominant concept of rationality,...

Since the politicization of anthropology in the 1970s, most anthropologists have been reluctant to approach the topic of universals—that is, phenomena that occur regularly in all known human societies. In this volume, Christoph Antweiler reasserts the importance of these cross-cultural commonalities for anthropological research and for life and co-existence beyond the academy. The question presented here is how anthropology can help us approach humanity in its entirety, understanding the w...

This book covers Rudolf Steiner’s biography, presented from an educational point of view and also unfolds the different aspects of Steiner’s educational thought in Waldorf Education. His point of view is unique in that it relates education to a wide horizon of different contexts, such as social, pedagogical, evolutionary and spiritual aspects. His ideas are philosophical (ethical, epistemological, ontological). However, above all, they are based on spiritual understanding of the human bein...

In this book, the author develops a relational concept of space that encompasses social structure, the material world of objects and bodies, and the symbolic dimension of the social world. Löw’s guiding principle is the assumption that space emerges in the interplay between objects, structures and actions. Based on a critical discussion of classic theories of space, Löw develops a new dynamic theory of space that accounts for the relational context in which space is constituted. This innov...

Constructivism has been traded as a new paradigm by its advocates, and criticised by its opponents as legitimating deceit and lies, as justifying a trendy post-modern "Anything goes".In this book, Bernhard Poerksen draws up a new rationale for constructivist thinking and charts out directions for the imaginative examination of personal certainties and the certainties of others, of ideologies great and small. The focus of the debate is on the author's thesis that our understanding of journa...