Cultural Studies

Punishment is seen as being a matter of course. As the saying goes, whoever will not hear must feel. However, the contradiction embodied here is rarely voiced. After all, reacting to experienced suffering with punitive pain shows that the law is still based on a myth today: it believes it can bring vulnerable subjects to their senses through suffering and in this way do justice to the existential plight of the victims. A law that recognizes this contradiction must find other answers.

That the period between 1380 and 1520 did not see a late medieval setting of the sun on, but rather the dawn of a powerful new era of dynamic religion is the main thesis of Berndt Hamm's new volume presented here. Driven by a fearful anticipation of the afterlife and fuelled by a desire for grace and salvation, religion was propelled towards piety, theology, and pastoral care, which in turn gave rise to a surge in sacred artistic expression.

In the era of pandemics, hyper-digitalization, mass migration, and precarious ecology, the idea of what it means to live as a bodily creature is more important than ever. The authors of this volume aim to 'think' the Unthinkable Body both together with, and beyond, embodied reason.

The digital revolution has created a need to orientate human practice, something that Protestant media ethics is not exempt from. Constantin Plaul's study provides the systematic groundwork for this and examines the orientation potential of freedom understood in Christian terms.