Project Details
Projekt
Resilience in prayer. Lament as a spiritual expression of fear and confidence
Applicant
Professorin Dr. Judith Gärtner
Subject Area
Protestant Theology
Term
from 2019 to 2023
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 348851031
The function and aim of the project is to develop resilience as a dynamic and at the same time ambivalent process between the endurance and the formation of the experience of distress as a productive category of interpretation for the Old Testament`s lament literature. In the knowledge that resilience is not a term of the source language, the interdisciplinary discussion aims to develop criteria for the discourse analytical description of the resilience narratives in the lament literature, which at the same time is meant to contribute to the specification of the definition of resilience of the whole research group. Next to the anthropological foundation and the meaning of the form of lament, the discourse analysis of resilience narratives constitutes the methodical and hermeneutic approach of the project. As a second step follows the analysis of explanatory texts by the example of a psalm group called Psalms of Illness (Ps 6; 30; 32; 38; 39; 51; 69; 88; 91). Due to their focus on individual physical and psychological suffering, they are of particular relevance to the interdisciplinary discourse with psychosomatic and palliative medicine. As a third step follows the systematizing evaluation, which aims to analyze the potential for medical, therapeutic and pastoral interventions. These results are going to be the foundation of interdisciplinary developing a comprehensive concept of resilience and of refining the shared hermeneutics of resilience. The project contributes to this by discourse-shaping narratives, speech- and reaction schemata of the Jewish-Christian tradition. The project provides for the interdisciplinary discussion a discourse analytical link between the resilience narratives of the so-called Psalms of Illness and their development potential for current crises due to a polyvalence of ideas about God, which are able to encompass in their multifaceted nature the complexity of the experience of crisis.
DFG Programme
Research Units
