Research Seminar in Inter-Religious Relations - Dr Jessica Frazier 'Doing Religious Studies with Gadamer: A Journey from Cultural Language, to Spiritual Bildung to Global Destiny' Friday, 17 January 2020 1.30-3.30pm in the Lightfoot Room
You are warmly invited to attend the first seminar of the Inter-Religious Relations Research Seminar Series held during Lent Term 2020. The seminar will be preceded by a sandwich lunch in the Selwyn Room at 1pm.
Dr Jessica Frazier has sent the following summary of her talk:
Hans-Georg Gadamer was a secular man who rarely mentioned religion – yet he worked with religious and/or spiritual traditions for most of his life, and was the author of a theory that placed inter-cultural understanding at the heart of human flourishing and fulfilment. In this seminar we will explore the way his account of inter-cultural understanding stands within broader Bildung-based philosophies of spiritual growth and communal health. We see how his readings of Greek thought took it as a religious worldview, how this was echoed in his treatment of poetic discourse and the arts, and how this informed his late expansion of hermeneutics into philosophies of self, education, art, health, and globalism. In all, we see how a Gadamerian reading of Religious Studies casts it as the creative ‘art’ of understanding, and the process by which the raw material of culture itself comes into being throughout history.
Colleagues, undergraduate, MPhil and PhD students from within and outside the Faculty of Divinity are welcome.