Ethics, Religious Dialogue and Diaconal Studies
The three disciplines Ethics, Religious Dialogue, and Diaconal Studies all put research into close contact with central social challenges, both nationally and internationally.
Presentation of the Research Area
What Ethics, Religious Dialogue, and Diaconal Studies all have in common is that they meet practical challenges with central theoretical perspectives. The result is internationally recognized research with great scholarly and social significance.
The researchers in this area have a highly developed expertise within their respective fields, whilst they also often work in interdisciplinary contexts. The theoretical inspiration is often taken from phenomenological and anthropological traditions, although other traditions from philosophical hermeneutics and critical social science are significant, as well as the more recent field of interreligious studies.
Important questions within Ethics are how knowledge of ethical judgment comes into being, through written rules and principles, or through practice and experience.
Religious dialogue works on the conditions for establishing trusting communication across religious traditions and open conversations concerning shared challenges in the pluralistic society.
Diaconal studies interpret Christianity’s social practice for the disadvantaged, based in today’s critical discussions of the way in which systems and people can give respect and dignity to the other.
The research environments connected to Ethics, Religious Dialogue, and Diaconal Studies all deliver to the educational programs at the Faculty of Theology: Vocational Training in Theology; the Masters in Religion and Society; and the Masters in Professional Ethics and Diaconal Studies. The two last programs are particularly central, and together make up a large proportion of the Masters students at the Faculty of Theology. Many of the teachers and research fellows in the research area also collaborate actively with other researchers in Ethics and Religion at the University of Oslo within the inter-faculty area PluRel, Religion in Pluralistic Societies.
Research Projects
- Broken Women, Healing Traditions
- The Sensible and the Transcendent (in Norwegian)
- Religion in a Globalised World (completed - in Norwegian)
Networks
- Nordic Network in Qumran Studies
- Nordic Society for Philosophy of Religion
- Philosophy of Religion In Northern Europe
- The Seminar in Gender and Theology (in Norwegian)
- European Society for Intercultural Theology and Interreligious Studies – ESITIS