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Author: Jörg Rüpke

Announcements / Billets

New publication by Jörg Rüpke

Publilius Syrus was one of the most successful mimes on the stages of 1st century BCE Rome. His plays were transmitted as Sententiae of Seneca and were subject to constant re-editing and agglomeration. It is hardly possible to isolate an original core, free of imperial or late ancient additions. In a reception perspective, however, a hermeneutical approach of this widely read corpus is possible. This chapter argues that the maxims formulated are not just a cynical commentary on contemporary society, but the proposal of a multi-faceted value “urbanity”, even if the very term urbanitas is not used in the text.

Case Studies / Concepts & Theory / Europe / Personal Reflections / The Mediterranean

How to write the history of religion in the making?

Traditional religious historiography attempts to grasp ‘religions’ in their becoming, possibly their founding, their slow or radical changes – similar to how urban historiography undertook. This brought transformations into view that, in the extreme case, could take on their own form in the splitting and splitting off of religious groups…

Case Studies / Concepts & Theory / Europe / Personal Reflections / The Mediterranean

Comparing World Religions?

Today, the academic study of religion in the discipline widely called Religious Studies or Religionswissenschaft has developed into a large array of thematical fields and foci, of general approaches and source-specific methods. As such it is ranging from historical and anthropological disciplines through social sciences and economics to philosophies and theologies, either conceived as a proper discipline overlapping with these other disciplines or seen as a subdiscipline to the one or other of them. What I am advocating today is the use of a term defining the traditional object of Religious Studies, namely “religion” and its use for comparison on a global scale…

Announcements / Book Reviews & Exhibitions / Concepts & Theory / Personal Reflections / Talks & Papers

Historische Vorstellungen zwischen Fiktion und Geschichtserzählung

Die eigene Arbeit am Manuskript einer globalen Religionsgeschichte unter dem Fokus von „Religion und Urbanität“ wirft nicht nur Fragen nach den Möglichkeiten und Grenzen des Vergleichs, dem Umgang mit objektsprachlichen und metasprachlichen Terminologien und der ganz praktischen Frage der Stoffauswahl auf. Sie macht auch die Frage nach dem Übergangsfeld von historischem Erzählen und Fiktion auf…

Billets / Concepts & Theory / Personal Reflections / Talks & Papers

Frischer Wind in alten Gassen: Zweitausend Jahre Stadtplanung

Eine Zeitreise in die Antike, das erste Jahrtausend v. Chr., und eine Reise aus Mitteleuropa in die Gegenden, in denen man zu schreiben verstand. Erst mit Hilfe der Schrift gelang es Expertinnen und Experten das flüchtige Element Wind so dauerhaft in Gedankengebäuden einzufangen, dass wir uns heute noch damit auseinandersetzen können.

Announcements / Billets / Case Studies / Concepts & Theory / Talks & Papers

Urban and religious change: A comparative perspective

Jörg Rüpke. Religious change and changes of urbanity (summarizing urban practices and reflexive urban imaginations) must be analysed in their mutual dependency to give better accounts of both, urban history and religious history. Many crucial developments in local and trans-local religion and religions need to be reviewed with regard to their specifically urban conditionality. At the same time, such urban conditions and the very discourses and practices that defined conditions as urban have not been “independent variables” for religious change but are themselves in part the outcome of religious practices and agents.

Billets / Case Studies / Europe / Personal Reflections

Christmas carols

Sometimes it is the absence that makes the obvious visible. On 4 December 2023, the music stopped at some German Christmas markets, including Erfurt. The reason for this was the protest against the high licence fees for the public – and undoubtedly sales-promoting – playing of music recordings by composers and performers who had not long since died. Christmas and songs, indeed celebrating Christmas and singing, seem to belong together.  From “Silent Night” to “Dreaming of a White Christmas” and even more recent songs: it’s hard to imagine Christmas without them. And vice versa: without the festival, all these songs would lose their meaning. 

Billets / Concepts & Theory / Personal Reflections

Urban religion and objects

by Jörg Rüpke. The summer school “Roman rituals: dynamics, topography and objects: Introduction to Roman religion through the prism of its materiality” – co-organized by the “Religion and Urbanity” group in Erfurt with the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes, Paris, La Sapienza, Rome, and the Université catholique de Louvain in cooperation with the Deutsches Archäologisches Institut, the Ecole française de Rome, the Academia Belgica and the Museo Nazionale Etrusca Villa Giulia in September 2023 – has addressed the questions of urbanity as being reflected in and constitutive for religious objects.

Billets / Concepts & Theory / Glossary

Religion

Religion is the human attribution of capabilities and agency to superhuman actors, which one tries to share with other humans but people also use to gain superiority over other humans and maybe their gods. In this way, in religious action people create a reality that allows for alternative experiences and interpretations of the everyday or even of the extra-ordinary. This opens a unique creativity. Nowhere else but in religion does human action create such different and diverse worlds (notwithstanding all those worlds of fantasy that often build on religious narratives and establish religious figures).

Case Studies / Europe / Personal Reflections

Christmas and Christmas Markets

The basic theological idea of the Christian Christmas is the incarnation of God, the “birthday of the Lord”, as it has been called since the fourth century AD, natalis domini. What the Latin churches celebrate on 25 December, the Eastern churches associate with 6 January, Epiphany, the “Epiphany of the Lord”. You have to delve deep into the philosophy and mythology…

Billets / Concepts & Theory / Glossary

Religious and urban ambivalences

The concept of ambivalence – in difference to diffusionism, historical dialectics, development, or progress – takes a synchronic stance and observes tensions and contradictions. It stresses conflict and constitutive ambiguity, bi-polar orders, bi-valence at any given moment. The opposition in a religious or urban ambivalence is neither dissolved in good and bad religion, good and bad urbanity nor are such ambivalences seen as ephemeral and transitory. As a consequence, metamorphosis of such ambivalences is not about gaining in mono-valence, one-to-one, or reduction of complexity.

Announcements / Book Reviews & Exhibitions / Case Studies / Personal Reflections

Urban Religion in the Metropolis Tokyo and in Kyoto

Religious practices, religious spaces, and religious times are part of urban diversity in today’s towns and cities. A 40-page picture book, grown out of a cooperation with Japanese universities in the framework of research on “Religion and Urbanity”, documents some impressions of that from visits to Tokyo and Kyoto…

Case Studies / Concepts & Theory / Personal Reflections / The Mediterranean

Getrennte Wege – geteilte Praktiken: Überlegungen zum kaiserzeitlichen Religionswandel in den Städten des römischen Reiches

Religion wurde im Laufe der Kaiserzeit in den ans Mittelmeer grenzenden Regionen Afrikas, Asiens und Europas immer wichtiger. Verantwortlich dafür werden immer wieder bestimmte (aber immer wieder anders gruppierte) Symbol- und Glaubenssysteme gemacht…