Colloquium on the occasion of the 85th birthday of a.D. Prof. Dr. Barbara Aland
The 67e Entretiens sur l’Antiquité classique de la Fondation Hardt
Award of Encyclopedia of the Bible and its Reception (EBR) 2020
The Barbara Schadeberg lectures
The Barbara Schadeberg lectures were held on October 24th and 25th 2019 at the Schloss Münster an event organised by the Barbara-Schadeberg-Foundation, whose main purpose is to promote Protestant schools.
This year’s lectures from the field of science and application (Wissenschaft und Praxis) were dedicated to the topic: “The Ability to practice plurality - dealing with diversity” (Pluralitätsfähigkeit – Umgang mit Vielfalt).
The members, participants and representatives of Protestant schools from all over Germany were welcomed in the lecture hall at Schlossplatz with the foundation motto: “Encourage one another and build up each other” (1Thess 5.11), by the Vice rector Prof. Dr. Regina Jucks, the President Dr. h.c. Annette Kurschus and the founder Barbara Lambrecht-Schadeberg.
Prof. Dr. Christina Hoegen-Rohls, director of the Münster Lectures and curator of the Barbara-Schadeberg-Foundation, opened the two days of lectures with her talk on biblical-theological perspectives on the diversity between creation and new creation.
The lectures were concluded after stimulating discussions in the palace garden café with the presentation of the Barbara-Schadeberg-Prize. Under the musical accompaniment of “Jazz Force One”, the foundation awarded prizes to Protestant schools that were particularly able to put inclusion, plurality and diversity into practice.
This year’s prize winners included young guests from the school “Talitha Kumi”, who had travelled from Palestine to receive their special prize.
Who was ‘James’?
Challenging Concepts of Epistolary Authorship
Internationale Tagung auf Schloss Wilkinghege/Münster, 6.-8. August 2019
The debate about James’ literary and religious profile is open-ended. Much seems to depend on the identification of who “James, the servant of the Lord” (Jas 1:1) as the epistolary author might have been in historical terms. Historical quests, however, are not based on sufficient historical evidence: For instance, we do not know for certain, whether the self-designation of the letter-writer as “James” is at all authentic or rather pseudepigraphic.
The quest for James’ epistolary authorship and its intellectual provenience thus has to move beyond the pure investigation of historical authorship.
Instead, a multi-dimensional concept of epistolary authorship is needed, where observations on the explicit, the implicit, the historical, and the literary author are combined and broadened by studies on style, rhetoric, literary criticism, religious profile, authorization, communicative structures and so forth.
In line with how ancient concepts of authorship have been re-evaluated in recent research and made to be crucial keys for textual interpretation, especially in the fields of Pauline epistolography and Hellenistic-Roman author-literature this conference - held on occasion of Prof. Dr. Oda Wischmeyer's 75th birthday, organized by Eve-Marie Becker (Münster) and Susanne Luther (Groningen) and funded by the Thyssen Stiftung - applied the research on ancient authorship in particular to the study of James.
The interdisciplinary conference brought together scholars with varying perspectives and views on James (s. flyer: https://www.uni-muenster.de/EvTheol/nt/tagungen/index.html ).
The conference encouraged a debate where the methodological presuppositions and implications of identifying “James” and their consequences for reading and interpreting the letter as a piece of the emerging Christ-believing literary culture are revealed and put forward for further discussion.
The conference proceedings will be published at Mohr Siebeck in 2021 ("Who was 'James'?").
Inaugural lecture from Prof. Dr. Eve-Marie Becker
On June, 27th, 2019 Prof. Eve-Marie Becker held her inaugural lecture at the WWU Münster on the topic: "Der homo occupatus - im Spiegel des Neuen Testaments".