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[German Version] I. Religious Studies – II. Philosophy of Religion – III. Christianity – IV. Taoism I. Religious Studies It is inherent in the conditio humana that we are forced to master everyday situations and withstand critical moments. To do so, members of every society need handy codes of conduct to survive the manifold crises. Life and death, time and eternity, meaning and meaninglessne…

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[German Version] I. Religious Studies 1. Human destiny. The human experience of existence holds both positive and negative events. Personal and structural processes involving violence and suffering are constants. The “horizon of justice and righteousness” allows us to surmise that the events that take place in the course of the world are not random but are turbulences on the surface of a fundamental order. Disorientation (anomie) does not destroy the need for security. These turbulences remain a question to which religious ¶ traditions and atheistic projections of Dasein offer answers. 2. Religious responses. The cultures that explain such contrary experiences (legitimation) and make them tolerable (motivation) are contextual, but they provide models of decipherment (paradigms) that make it possible for a society to cope with its fate. God’s righteousness and liberation are positive expressions of this hope. Its opposite counterparts are God’s punishment and judgment (Divine judgment). The symbolic worlds of religions vary with the focus of their cultures but can be characterized typologically. (a) In the shamanic/magical perception of the world (Shamanism), the ecological, social, and human imbalance in the cosmos is related to protective and threatening fields of energy, manipulated by ancestors, spirits, or deities. An unwritten tradition of proverbial wisdom records these connections. God’s justice is realized in potent regularities and rituals (Magic). (b)…

[German Version] I. Religious Studies Certainty is a fundamental human need. The answers given by religions to unsettling experiences cover a broad cultural spectrum. The issue is (1) to foresee fate as much as possible, (2) to integrate it into a cosmology, and (3) thus to master it. In general terms, we can identify four ways of containing the unforese…

[German Version] I. History of Religion – II. Old Testament – III. Judaism – IV. New Testament – V. History of Theology – VI. Creation and Preservation – VII. Religious Education – VIII. Islam – IX. Science – X. Art History…