Theology in the Third Reich Speaker Series
Martin Luther, the Bible, and the Jewish People
Rev. Dr. Brooks Schramm, Professor of Biblical Studies, Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg
Tuesday, January 24, 3:30-6:00 p.m.; Gibson Hall 341
Dr. Schramm is Professor of Biblical Studies at Lutheran Theological Seminary at Gettysburg. He is the chair of the Graduate Studies Committee and the editor of Seminary Ridge Review. Dr. Schramm holds a Ph.D. in Hebrew Bible from The University of Chicago.
Dr. Schramm's current project, with his spouse Kirsi Stuerna, is Martin Luther, the Bible, and the Jewish People: A Reader (forthcoming, Fortress Press, 2012).
Listen to Dr. Schramm's lecture here.
Karl Barth and the Struggle against Fascism
Dr. Paul Dafydd Jones, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, University of Virginia
Tuesday, February 14, 3:30-6:00 p.m.; Gibson Hall 341
Paul Dafydd Jones is a British theologian whose teaching and research focus on Protestant theology in the modern West. He joined the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Virginia in the autumn of 2006. He holds an M.A. in Theology from Oxford University, an M.Div from Harvard Divinity School, and an A.M. and Ph.D. from Harvard University. His first book was a study of Karl Barth's Christology, The Humanity of Christ: Christology in Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics. Currently he's working on two book-length projects. The first is an examination of Protestant views of the atonement; the second is a constructive theological exploration of patience.
Listen to Dr. Jones' lecture here.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer Confronts Nazi Eugenics and Euthanasia
Dr. LeRoy Walters, Professor Emeritus, Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University
Tuesday, February 28, 3:30-6:00 p.m.; Gibson Hall 341
LeRoy Walters is the Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. Professor of Christian Ethics Emeritus at the Kennedy Institute of Ethics, Georgetown University. He is also a professor emeritus in Georgetown University's Department of Philosophy. Professor Walters was educated at Messiah College, the Associated Mennonite Seminaries, the University of Heidelberg, the Free University of Berlin, and Yale University.
In recent years the academic attention of Professor Walters has been focused primarily on the history of the Jewish Holocaust, the life and thought of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the treatment of people with disabilities during the era of German National Socialism. His essay, “Paul Braune Confronts the National Socialists’ ‘Euthanasia’ Program” was published in Holocaust and Genocide Studies in 2007. For the past two years Professor Walters has been a faculty member in a fellowship program sponsored by the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. This program, called Fellowships at Auschwitz for the Study of Professional Ethics (FASPE), includes on-site study in Germany and Poland. The program invites seminary students and graduate students in religion to consider the professional obligations of religious leaders in light of the Holocaust.
Listen to Dr. Walters' lecture here.
The Nazi Conscience
Dr. Claudia Koonz, Peabody Family Professor of History, Duke University
Wednesday, March 21, 3:30-6:00 p.m.; Jefferson Hall (Hotel C, West Range)
One theme runs through Claudia Koonz’s scholarship and teaching: how have ordinary, decent people convinced themselves to collaborate with evil – and still see themselves as moral? One part of the answer lies in their capacity to imagine that some kinds of people are not quite human after all. Her Mothers in the Fatherland investigated women’s ‘separate sphere’ as a way women (and men) distanced themselves from the consequences of their actions, and The Nazi Conscience investigated the role of experts, theologians, and intellectuals in making anti-Semitism respectable among Germans who did not consider themselves die-hard Nazi Party members. Her current research on British, French, and German reactions to the Muslim headscarf carries this theme in a new direction. Koonz is the Peabody Family Professor of History at Duke University.
Constructive Christian Theology after the Holocaust
Dr. J. Kameron Carter, Associate Professor in Theology and Black Church Studies, Duke Divinity School
Tuesday, April 17, 3:30-6:00 p.m.; Jefferson Hall (Hotel C, West Range)
Professor Carter teaches courses in both theology and black church studies. Working as a theologian, he addresses the basic areas of Christian thought, especially attending to Christology (the person and work of Jesus Christ) and theological anthropology (the human being in Christian perspective). But in engaging such matters, he does so with a view not just to the church or to Christian believers. He does so with a view to the broader humanities, particularly, with an eye toward such fields as cultural studies, gender studies, and philosophy and literature. His book Race: A Theological Account (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008) has recently appeared.
He is presently working on a new book on the ideological uses of Jesus in the modern invention of the human, and thus in the making and sustaining of the present. Addressing this in its religious, secular, and now arguably post-secular forms, Professor Carter calls this the problem of “the cultural Jesus.” The project provides a theological, which at the same time is a cultural, archaeology of the present by getting inside of this problem. But beyond this, and having gotten inside of this problem, Professor Carter reimagines the identity of Jesus and the politics of his identity in light of the new, global realities of the 21st century.