"Religion and Politics" – Cluster of Excellence at the UNiversity of Münster

Organised jointly by the University of Münster and the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, an international conference in Mid-October will focus on the Council of Nicaea 1,700 years ago and its ecumenical, interreligious and intercultural significance. ‘The creed established by the first ecumenical council in history is still of fundamental importance to the Catholic Church, as well as to Orthodox and most Protestant churches today. Nicaea has raised complex questions from an interreligious perspective, especially with regard to Jewish-Christian and Christian-Islamic relations – it is these question that the interdisciplinary conference will address’, says Professor of Dogmatics Michael Seewald from Münster, who is organising the conference together with Philipp G. Renczes SJ, Dean of the Faculty of Theology at the Gregorian University. Read more

The world’s most important collection of magisterial texts of the Roman Catholic Church will in future be edited by Professor of Dogmatics Michael Seewald from the University of Münster. Available in numerous languages, the ‘Denzinger’ compendium brings together the most important decisions made by the Church’s magisterium from antiquity to the present day. Seewald is taking over the work of Peter Hünermann, Professor of Dogmatics in Tübingen until 1997, who edited the compendium for more than 30 years, including its current 45th edition, published by Herder. The new edition will be published as part of the CREDENZ (Critical Edition of the Denzinger) research project, which Seewald plans to run for seven years. Besides the editorial work, this will involve research into how dogmatic norms arise through recourse to authoritative collections of texts, and how they alter with this canon. Read more

Between religious tradition and aesthetic innovation: Russian art and literature of the 19th and 20th centuries contain numerous references to icon painting – for example, in Dostojevsky’s novel ‘The Idiot’, Sergei Eisenstein's film ‘Bežin lug’ or Kazimir Malevich's ‘Black Square’.
“References to icons reveal a worldview, one that is certainly also political in nature,” says Slavic scholar Irina Wutsdorff from the University of Münster, whose research at the Cluster of Excellence “Religion and Politics” focuses on the significance of icons in Russian art and literature, in an interview together with Daniela Amodio.
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