Project Details
Projekt
Interment in Natural Spaces - Ecclesiastical Reactions and Theological Processing
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Ulrike Wagner-Rau
Subject Area
Protestant Theology
Term
from 2015 to 2018
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 271761960
Throughout the last decades funeral practices have been changing noticeably. Funeral space is no longer confined to the enclosed area of the cemetery. Burial in the network of the roots of a tree is the most well known form of burial outside the cemetery and the form that is increasing most rapidly. Companies like FriedWald GmbH and RuheForst GmbH, as well as numerous communal providers, offer burials in designated woodland areas. The decision for a burial in a FriedWald Forest is evidently not only motivated by pragmatic reasons. It also combines with individual interpretations of death, based on historico-cultural perspectives on nature. Our project is supposed to identify the attitude of Protestant clergy towards this type of funeral in a qualitative empirical study, as well as reflect on it practical-theologically. The means for this will be interviews with the professionals and their reconstructive evaluation with regard to their formative structures of meaning. In an analysis of the interviewee's sermons at Friedwald/tree-burials the relation between the attitudes and their translation into public theological speech will be reflected. The aim is to elaborate how this type of funeral is theologically dealt with and shaped in the pastoral practice of the Protestant churches. Therefore, the project, based in the practical field of Special Services, deals with the challenges of practical-theological thought and ecclesiastical acting throughout the religio-cultural change of late modernity. This change is of paradigmatic significance for practical-theological reflexion in the present religious practice.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
