Veit Rosenberger: Divine Diets: Food and Drink of the Early Monks

Today, Veit Rosenberger is presenting his paper on 'Divine Diets: Food and Drink of the Early Monks'

 

Here follows his abstract:

Late Antiquity offered a significant variety of monastic lifestyles. On the one hand, there were the ideal monks like Antony (as described by Athanasius) or the ascetics following the rules set up by Benedict and/or his forerunners. On the other hand, a large number of monks lived on their own, without rule or abbot, like the Sarabaites mentioned in the Regula Benedicti. Whereas it was, as we know from Augustinus, no problem to give up sexuality, eating and drinking formed a lifelong challenge, because the body simply needed food and drink on a regular basis. Therefore, notices about the diet and fasting practices reflect a number of conflicts of the early monks: inter alia the limits of personal choice, competition with other ascetics, personal closeness to God, and the concept of heresy. 

New issue of 'Religion in the Roman Empire (RRE)' published

The new issue of the journal, a publication based at the Max-Weber-Centre, Religion in the Roman Empire has been published, Volume 1, Number 2, 2015.

The issue contains:

Rubina Raja, Lara Weiss, The Role of Objects: Meanings, Situations and Interaction; pp. 137-147(11)
Richard Gordon, Showing the Gods the Way: Curse-tablets as Deictic Persuasion; pp. 148-180(33)
Ioanna Patera, Objects as Substitutes in Ancient Greek Ritual; pp. 181-200(20)
Andreas Kropp, The Tyche of Berytus: A Phoenician Goddess on Civic Coinage; pp. 201-218(18)
Hallie G. Meredith, Engaging Mourners and Maintaining Unity: Third and Fourth Century Gold-Glass Roundels from Roman Catacombs; pp. 219-241(23)
Alison Cooley, Multiple Meanings in the Sanctuary of the Magna Mater at Ostia; pp. 242-262(21)
Drew Wilburn, Inscribed Ostrich Eggs at Berenike and Materiality in Ritual Performance; pp. 263-285(23)

The electronic access you will find here. 

Veronika Hoffmann on 'Thinking about Religious Doubt: First Attempts and Clarifications'

Veronika Hoffmann is going to speak on 11 November 2015 (10:15am) at the Max-Weber-Center, Erfurt, on 'Thinking about Religious Doubt: First Attempts and Clarifications'

Abstract: Traditional Christian theology connects faith with certainty. Religious doubt poses a serious threat to faith and is thus viewed as highly problematic. Contemporary theological positions tend to question this kind of connection. Alternative views understand religious doubt as safeguarding faith against fundamentalistic tendencies or as a helpful tool for the purification of faith. The research project explores these conceptual changes regarding religious doubt. It uses Charles Taylor´s concept of a „secular age“ as a diagnostic tool to connect the theological debate with cultural changes.

HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY SECTION LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD GOES TO HANS JOAS

HISTORY OF SOCIOLOGY SECTION LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD

This award recognizes sociologists who have made outstanding contributions to the history of sociology throughout their career, or who have made ground breaking innovations or produced significant bodies of scholarly work in the history of sociology.

 

Members of the committee this year were:

• Grégoire Mallard, Graduate Institute for International and Development Studies, Geneva, Switzerland [chair]
• Donald N. Levine, University of Chicago
• Edward A. Tiryakian, Duke University

 The recipient of the 2015 Lifetime Achievement Award is:

 

Hans Joas, University of Chicago and former director of the Max-Weber-Center, Erfurt

Philippe-Louis Vien: The magnificent training: Walter Bagehot and Max Weber on Parliamentary politics

Between the hagiographies following the wake of Marianne Weber’s Lebensbild, Mommsen’s Wegbereiter thesis, and the works of those, indirectly writing against the first two receptions, who see in him an insightful political scientist, Max Weber’s political thought is the object of three massively different interpretations. With the help of Pocock’s theory of political language I intend to shed lights on the English influences of Weber’s conception of modern politics. In this I follow the intuitions of Günther Roth in his Work on “Weber The Would-beEnglishman”. But where his writings are based on the economic history of Weber’s extended family, I want to investigate the structure of his political thoughts as to reveal how Weber’s political ideas, if often described as unique and extraordinary in the German context of his time, are based on interrogations and themes that would appear as common for late-Victorians. In order to identify the common tensions upon which a shared political language is articulated, I compare Weber’s writing on politics with those of two iconic Victorian political authors, namely Walter Bagehot and John Stuart Mill. From their (I) historiography, to their conception of the parliamentary institutions, be it their roles as tools of State administration (II) or in their influence on the political education of the nation (III), or in their relation to (IV) Statesmanship, what reveals itself is a common conception of modern politics, a common view on the necessity of strong parliamentary institutions in modern states, and a common adherence to the short lived brand of agonistic liberalism.
Vien's paper given at the Max-Weber-Kolleg on 2nd November 2015 is the first real attempt at outlining some of the intuitions I have about the influence of Victorian political thoughts on Weber’ own one. Build upon the specific conception of Statesmanship that derives from Victorian parlamentarianism, the content of this text will most probably find its place in what is projected as the 7th chapter of Vien's PhD thesis. In its present form, this text is no chapter yet. In the hope of publishing it as a scholarly paper, he decided to concentrate his argumentation exclusively on Bagehot and Weber, and completely leave aside John Stuart Mill from the discussion. Aside from the validity of its demonstration, the main element concerned with in this paper is the sequencing of its arguments, or, if one may say, its stratégie d’exposition. One can see two ways of writing down such a piece. The first one is a theme-by-theme approach, proposing both authors’ views on a specific theme in a joint section and presenting my different themes in succession. The second option is to brush two distinct and separate overall pictures of my authors’ thoughts and comparing these two portraits. One can see how a theme-by-theme approach allows for a more detailed analysis of the subjects at hand, but one fears it detaches the reader from the overall picture, making it hard for him to recognize the comprehensive thought system he is being presented with. Vien opted for the second option, first presenting an author’s thought and then the other’s, but he would be really interested in the reader's views on all of that. 

Rahul Parson speaks on "Towards Indic Idioms of the Individual: Tolerance, (Im)partiality, and Individualization in two Jain Intellectual Lineage"

His paper given today discusses some preliminary observations about how difference, impartiality, and the figure of the individual operate in the works of four Jain thinkers. I look at two intellectual lineages to get a sense of how the typology of the individual or vyakti embodies, refracts, and transmits religious and philosophical views (darśana). The individual’s intentions, partiality, environment, and position on the spiritual Stufensytem (guṇasthāna) informs how a religious teaching manifests. This is part of a broader discussion about religious variation, difference, and accommodation in Indic religions. The individual is at the center of this discussion of ‘tolerance’ because some Jain thinkers posit that religious difference is the product of individualized religious variation. In the recognition of historically constant and reoccurring unique vyaktis (individual, manifestation, expression), these thinkers reconciled the singularity of essential religious truth with the multitude of views regarding what that truth could be. The vyakti, as a typology, is a figure who allows for variety without being at variance with Jainism. While these Jain thinkers use the figure of vyakti and variation for different agendas, they all evince a qualified accommodation and recognition of difference, which emerges from a core Jain philosophical principle of non-absolutism.

Space, Place and Migration in Modern Art - Jutta Vinzent delivers the Salek Minc Lecture on August 7, 2015 at the Lawrence Wilson Art Gallery, University of Western Australia

Jutta Vinzent delivers the Salek Minc Lecture (2015)

This year’s Salek Minc Lecture was held in conjunction with the exhibition Elise Blumann: An Émigré Artist in Western Australia, 1938–1948 (11 July–19 September 2015) and presented by Dr. Jutta Vinzent, Senior Lecturer in Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at the University of Birmingham, UK, and Research Fellow at the Max Weber Centre for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies at the University of Erfurt, Germany. The lecture can be watched here.


The Lecture:
Thank you very much for having invited me. I'm delighted to be here, and again, thank you for the introduction and I'm humbled and I hope I can deliver.The Lecture:

                     This lecture is indeed held in honor of Salek Minc, a medical practitioner who also published a series of articles on the relationship between medicine and culture. Being a cardiologist, he felt that unresolved emotions suppressed by normed behavior induced tensions, which may form medical problems such as heart disease. For him, contemplation and immersion in art could help resolve such tensions. His view may have been influenced by his own life experiences.

                     Similarly, to many of those mentioned today, he was a Jewish émigré from the 1930s. According to Sally Quinn, who curated and wrote the catalogue for the exhibition Bauhaus on the Swan: Elise Blumann, An Émigré Artist in Western Australia, 1938-1948, Minc also knew Elise Blumann personally in the 1940s through émigré gatherings in Paris.

                     Born in the Russian town of Siedlce, which is today in Poland, in 1905 ... I've brought you a picture of Salek Minc, which is unfortunately small. Minc also knew Elise personally. He was born in 1905, as you can see. Minc started medicine in Italy, graduating in 1925 to become a specialist physician.

                     In 1935, the same year in which National Socialist Germany introduced the so-called Nuremberg Laws defining Jews by ways and not belief, he left for the UK, [00:02:00] where he then joined a tourist vessel as a ship surgeon. Arriving in Perth in 1940, there he continued his passion from the 1920s, namely collecting and promoting the arts.

                     It is thanks to him and the kind invitation of Sally Quinn that I have been able to travel from Germany to Perth to be here today and speak about Space, Place and Migration in Modern Art. That's the exhibition and exhibition catalog for this exhibition in which we are placed, and this is what I'm going to talk about.

                     During the 1930s, thousands of refugees left Nazi Germany. Many went to Britain, so that London became a haven for modern art. It was also in London that "Circle: An International Survey of Constructive Art" was published, a key book on modern art with contributions from leading avant-garde artists. Edited by Naum Gabo, Ben Nicholson and Leslie Martin, the publication dealt foremost with the topic of space, namely in sculpture, painting, architecture and also in design.

                     This lecture will consider these conceptions of space in the 1930s and asks how such interest was reflective of migrants’ experiences of changing places and expanding spaces. It will argue that space was a feature relevant beyond a mere formalist analysis that may stretch to the formulation as I offer to you, which I have termed provisionally as spatial art history. Continue