Projects

In the context of contemporary intercultural and inter-religious tensions and processes of understanding, this line of inquiry into the significance of Christian faith is experiencing increasing significance and carries a formative influence on the majority of theological faculties in Germany. This is also the case in Bonn, even while this faculty at the same time remains – and rightly so – connected with the name of Karl Barth.

Among the most significant contributions of the liberal tradition are its extensive engagements with the concepts of religion and culture as well as its inquiry into the significance of media – including symbols, metaphor, images, narrative, interpretation – in the development and experience of these phenomena. The potential for an explicitly theological form of theology – as Barth called for and as is implied in the liberal tradition’s interest in contemporary forms of expression for liberal piety – has hardly been used up. The question is, in fact, of great significance: For only an enlightened “liberal piety,” attentive to and applied in the broader culture can guard against fundamentalist instrumentalisations of religion.

• Matthew Ryan Robinson, Ph.D.: The Be.Friend Projekt
• Katharina Opalka: "Das Geheimnis des religiösen Menschen vor sich selbst". Die Demut als performativer Vollzug - Überlegungen anhand einer Relecture Albrecht Ritschls
• Ann-Kathrin Armbruster: Philipp Melanchthons theologische Anthropologie. Ein Beitrag zur Tugendethik
• Jennifer Lackmann: Die Gegenwart Gottes - Eine hermeneutische Untersuchung der religiösen Rede von "Gottes Nähe" unter besonderer Berücksichtigung von Wittgenstein, Cassirer und den klassischen hermeneutischen Theologien von Fuchs, Ebeling und Jüngel
• Daniel Rossa: Leere voller Gott – Die Fruchtbarkeit negativer Theologie für die Dogmatik

Dissertation project by Johannes Fröh

Tl;dr: The dissertation project aims to epistemologically and practically open up theologies' access to digital religious/Christian communication. Objective: A tool for data scientific access and analysis of digital religious communication as well as theory on how this communication can inform theological research.

More extended (but not too long) version:

"Social media is becoming the most important channel of communication" - a bold statement by Ali Saha in her contribution to the 2021 collection "Pandemic Communication and Resilience" (see p. 349). Yet, considering the historically unprecedented mediatization process of the digital (see Stalder) facilitating the ever-increasing digitization of our globalized world, Saha's statement points towards a field that has barely been researched but potentially bears significant impact on the future of religion(s), church and faith: Digital religious communication.

The lack of theological research in this area is not just due to the (rather obvious) fact that digital and social media platforms are majorly just a phenomenon of the last two decades. Additionally,

1. theological epistemological concepts on how communication taking place in digital spaces (empirical side) can inform our theological research (hermeneutical side) is still in its infancy and
2. practical access to digital religious communication artifacts via a concept of "digital religious/Christian communication" that allows for deploying data scientific methods.

This dissertation project aims to address those two barriers (humbly and well aware of the limited "depth" proposed answers in the context of a dissertation will offer, but confident in making a first contribution towards solving them).

1. Therefore, the first part of the project will focus on how digital religious communication relates to the new and upcoming research area of digital religion (drawing from Heidi Campbell et al.) and digital theology (i.a., as conceptualized by Frederike van Oorschot).
2. In the second part of the project, the theological significance of empirical digital religious communication will be evaluated via concepts such as Karl Barth's "Verkündigungsbasierte Dogmatik" and Friedrich/Reichel/Renkert's testimony-based epistemology for their "citizen theology" (on the later see van Oorschot "Digital theology", 2020).
3. Afterward, building on the theoretical conceptualization of digital religious communication in 1., algorithms will be developed capable of collecting social media communication quoting the "holy scripture". The resulting database will then facilitate a machine learning-based approach to identifying religious communication.
4. In the last step, the trained algorithm capable of identifying religious communication on social media platforms will then be used to construct a second database. This second database will then be analyzed via a grounded theory-based approach to identify the empirical criteria of digital religious communication and relate them to the theoretical conceptualization.