Research

Research Profile and Themes

In my work as a historian of religion, I am particularly interested in the discursive structures that attribute meaning to and produce knowledge about “religion” in changing historical settings. Religion never arrives on its own; its cultural meaning and impact are always shaped by interaction with other societal domains, particularly with philosophy, science, art and literature, law, and politics.

Trained in comparative religion, philosophy, and Jewish studies, my doctoral research into Jewish and Christian astrology in late antiquity introduced me to fundamental theoretical and methodological issues that have occupied my work ever since. Astrology is a good example of how boundaries between systems of knowledge are constructed, and how contemporary discourses shape perceptions and definitions of past arrangements. Depending on one’s perspective and interests, astrology has been framed in terms of philosophy, religion, theology, superstition, science, empiricism, law, politics, agriculture, or psychology. It was only in the nineteenth century that the disjuncture—which is common today—between astronomy and astrology was introduced, at least in Europe and North America. A similar disjunctive mechanism was applied to magic versus science, and to alchemy versus chemistry; magic and alchemy were rendered “occult sciences,” and this turned out to be an important identity marker when it came to constituting “modernity.” Diagnoses of what it means to be “modern” in turn influenced the way the past was envisioned and historically reconstructed. My 2014 book, The Scientification of Religion: An Historical Study of Discursive Change, 1800–2000, discusses exactly these mechanisms. In my 2010 book, Locations of Knowledge in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Esoteric Discourse and Western Identities, I described the hybridity of knowledge systems that we often, and wrongly, perceive as being distinct from one another—most importantly philosophy, natural science, philology, art, mysticism, and religion.

I have studied similar questions with regard to shamanism. In my Schamanismus und Esoterik: Kultur- und wissenschaftsgeschichtliche Betrachtungen (Shamanism and Esotericism: Observations from Cultural and Scientific History, 2003) and in subsequent publications in English, I argued that European perceptions of shamanism since the sixteenth century have oscillated between refutation of and longing for shamanism. It is the genealogy of fascination with shamanism and its perceived privileged access to nature and the “sacred” that fostered shamanic practice in the twentieth century in Europe and North America. Shamanism has been linked to discourses on nature and the soul that have a long tradition in European thinking.

In my recent work, I have used the example of discourses on the soul to trace the strong interconnections between scientific research (both in the natural sciences and the humanities) and the formation of new spiritual identities and practices in Europe and North America between 1850 and today. This resulted in a monograph about the discursive history of the soul in the twentieth century. The German version was published with Wilhelm Fink in July 2019 as Die Seele im 20. Jahrhundert: Eine Kulturgeschichte, a revised English version was published in 2022 with Columbia University Press under the title A Cultural History of the Soul: Europe and North America from 1870 to the Present. In this book, I unravel discursive knots of religion, science, the soul, nature, psyche, animism, and more in their cultural contexts in the nineteenth century and follow their new entanglements through the twentieth century until today. Interestingly, while European and North American intellectual and political culture was virtually obsessed with the soul around 1900, the term “soul” almost entirely disappeared from academic psychological discourse after 1930 (as part of the discipline’s efforts to be accepted as an “exact” science), only to flourish outside of the academy in unprecedented ways, from literature and art to nature-based spiritualities to the idea that Earth (often addressed as “Gaia”) is an animated, living being. The study argues that concepts of the soul are vehicles of religious discourse in the twentieth century, in an increasingly globalized manner, nurtured by secular frames of meaning.

My published books also include an Introduction to the Study of Religion: Objects and Concepts (in German, 2003, co-authored with Hans G. Kippenberg), as well as two books that provide a historical overview for a broader audience: History of Astrology from the Earliest Times to the Present (in German, 2003, translated into three other languages) and Western Esotericism: A Brief History of Secret Knowledge (2007; also available in three other languages).

Theories and Methodologies

When it comes to a sound theory that would address all of these entanglements, I have found discursive approaches to religion to be most suitable. Rather than defining religion as an independent variable, it seems more fruitful to analyze the changing constellations that produce knowledge about and definitions of religion. I have published a number of articles on religion and discourse research, as well as a co-edited volume (with Frans Wijsen) Making Religion: Theory and Practice in the Discursive Study of Religion (2016). In a subsequent volume Discourse Research and Religion: Disciplinary Use and Interdisciplinary Dialogues (2021), which I co-edited with Jay Johnston, I provided the chapter on “Historical Discourse Analysis: The Entanglement of Past and Present.” Such an approach also underlies the two leading dictionaries of religion that I have edited: Vocabulary for the Study of Religion, ed. with Robert A. Segal, print version (3 vols.) plus online edition (2015); and The Brill Dictionary of Religion, 4 vols. (2005).

More recently, I have been working on the challenges to constructivist approaches (such as discourse research) that come from entanglement theories, relational approaches, object-oriented ontologies, and what has been introduced as “new materialisms.” In an interdisciplinary conversation, strongly informed by animal studies, ecology, and environmental ethics, as well as materialist trends in cultural studies, the parameters of studying religion in the twenty-first century are changing. I have engaged these topics as a member of the “New Animism” research group, as well as of the “New Materialism, Religion, and Planetary Thinking Seminar” of the American Academy of Religion.

Current Research

In my most recent work, I have focused on the emergence of new spiritual ideas and practices in Europe and North America that indicate a strong connection to Earth-based ethics and relational approaches to the nonhuman world. Most of these practices—such as shamanism, Paganism, and environmental activism—have grown significantly since the turn of the century, and phenomena such as astrology have even become mainstream, with a higher popularity than established religions.

This development is closely linked to what I call the “relational turn,” which no longer regards humans as the masters of the world, but rather integrates them into a complex network of relationships with the nonhuman world. Being a clear example of discourse communities, the interest in new spiritual practices coincides with developments in the sciences. One common feature of these new parameters is the realization that over against the urgent challenges that humanity is facing today, we need to overcome disciplinary boundaries and conceptual binaries. In this quest, I find inspiration particularly in emerging fields such as the critical posthumanities, biosemiotics, and conceptual frames such as agential realism. In a number of recent activities and publications, I have applied these considerations to the study of religion.

An article “Undisciplining the Study of Religion: Critical Posthumanities and More-than-human Ways of Knowing” was  published (Open Access) in 2023 as a contribution to a special issue of Religion, with the title “Animal Spirits: Knowing with Otherbodies” (ed. Jay Johnston & Teya Brooks Pribac). I explored these topics also in the Ivar Paulson Lectures in the Study of Religion, organized by the Estonian Society for the Study of Religions. The three invited lectures on European Animisms at the University of Tartu, Estonia, November 2023 (1. “The Colonial Invention of Animism”; 2: “European Animisms Today”; 3: “The Relational Turn and the Study of Religion”) are available online.

In these works, I argue for intersubjectivity instead of objectivity, for strategic inadequacy instead of regimes of mastery, and for knowledge that flows from ecologies of agency. The academic study of religion is a prominent part, in my interpretation, of the paradigm shift to relationality that we are experiencing today—a shift from regimes of mastery and exploitation to new ways of thinking about our place within the relational web of planetary life. This development will transform our ways of “doing” science. In the current situation, it is important to include various ways of knowing, both within and beyond the human moral community.

I’ve just published my new book with Europa Verlag under the title Nach der Ausbeutung: Wie unser Verhältnis zur Erde gelingen kann. An English version of this text is in preparation for 2024/25. The book formulates concrete future perspectives for a healthy human relationship with the world, in which scientific, artistic, and political-legal innovations come together consistently and programmatically. In overcoming the colonial plundering of the planet, non-European and Indigenous traditions of world relations gain particular significance, as do holistic European traditions such as Romanticism, which reject human fantasies of domination.

Public Engagement

In my view, scholars have a responsibility to engage with a wider audience and to get involved in cultural and political debates. The planet is currently undergoing a serious transformation, and we are in the middle of an unprecedented phase of extinction, caused by human regimes of domination. This situation calls for the concerted effort and active participation of scholars. As a humble contribution to this change, Whitney A. Bauman and I co-founded Counterpoint: Navigating Knowledge, a platform and space for critical reflection on the foundations, opportunities, and limitations of knowledge systems, located at the interface of academic and non-academic knowledge practices and traditions. What is more, I appear regularly as an expert for leading newspapers in various countries, including Die Zeit, Deutschlandfunk, De Volkskrant, Trouw, as well as the Swiss TV SRF and the German TV ZDF.

Last update: 3 September 2024