Albert Schweitzer

TOC to the Revised First Edition (2020) of this reader, which now includes chapters on the ethics of artificial intelligence and the ethics of human enhancement. The reader now covers a more fulsome range of topics that undergraduate and graduate students in a range of disciplines will find useful, from international relations to global aid to environmental protection.

A few years ago, WWJD was all the rage in Christian circles. What would Jesus do? was the question, so I asked the follow-up - About what? What would be so important for Jesus to do today?

Of course, everyone has an idea - that's the whole point of doing a christology (making Jesus our contemporary to justify our behaviors as if Jesus were offering commentary on our world today). It almost sound silly to put it that way, but that's what theology is - silly sometimes.

And everyone serious has/had an opinion about what Jesus would do today and about what - including H. Richard Niebuhr and Karl Barth to Albert Schweitzer and Friedrich Schleiermacher (to name a few classic heavyweights). And I had to name them because this paper is a lecture I gave at Elmhurst College (the home of Niebuhr papers and once-upon-a-time college president Reinhold Niebuhr himself.

It's among several pieces I put together while exploring the possibility of doing (another) christology - this time with some contemporary seriousness (see the questions about Jesus' gender, for example, suggested toward the close of the lecture).

People (students, that is... and students are people too)  loved it - but publishers wouldn't give me a second look. Their loss...

Albert Schweitzer lived in a time when many things were changing both in the world and in Christian theology. He served in Africa as a medical missionary from 1913-1965. Missions during this period were still influenced by 19th-century thinking and methods, but at the same time, a more critical and biblical understanding of missions started to develop. Schweitzer was a highly trained pastor, theologian, philosopher and doctor who was aware of the general views about missions in Europe and who took part in actual missionary work in Africa. Although, he did not write a specific work on missions he talked a lot about this topic in his sermons, his autobiography and his philosophical writings. As a Christian theologian, his main source is the Bible, but at the same time, his views on missions also show an interesting relationship with different ideologies. For example, from a biblical viewpoint, he seems to be more realistic and critical about the effects of colonization than others of his time. On the other hand, his theology of mission still accepts and utilizes most of the values of enlightenment liberalism, like the belief in progress and the goodness of humanity. In my paper, I would like to examine this twofold relationship towards ideologies in Albert Schweitzer’s works. My hope is that through this we can gain some deeper insights into the complex problems related to theologies, ideologies and human experiences.

This is a draft.  The final version appears in the Introduction to:

An Agnostic in the Fellowship of Christ: The Ethical Mysticism of Albert Schweitzer.  Fortress / Lexington Academic Press (2019).

https://rowman.com/ISBN/9781978701564/An-Agnostic-in-the-Fellowship-of-Christ-The-Ethical-Mysticism-of-Albert-Schweitzer?fbclid=IwAR0FWle2gjCl5lRI-4xJcC3oRFVsK0TM9NNhq8BCYz_tmpK3zwn-ERZvZp4

Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) was a humanitarian and scholar, whose medical mission in Africa drew both praise and criticism in academic discourses. At issue is Schweitzer's alleged role in the colonial exploitation of the African people under his medical care. This characterization of Schweitzer as a colonial " despot " has as its origin the imaginative biographical sketches by academics and journalists in his own time. This article examines the impact of those source materials on the representations of Schweitzer in academia today. It is argued that, while these first-generation source materials cannot be considered reliable, Schweitzer exhibited unacceptably colonial attitudes when evaluated with postcolonial critique. New ethical questions are then raised, together with a call for a fuller investigation of Schweitzer's place in central African history.

Monografia  zostaje  oddana  do  rąk  czytelnika  w  szczególnym momencie albowiem  na  marzec  2012  roku  przypadły  90  urodziny wielkiego  mentora  polskich  schweitzerowców – prof.    Henryka Gaertnera,  zaś  2013  rok  to  czas  obchodów  setnej  rocznicy  istnienia szpitala-symbolu – L’Hôpital du Docteur Alber Schweitzer w gabońskim Lambaréné.  Prof.  Henryk  Gaertner,  wieloletni  pracownik  klinik Uniwersytetu  Jagiellońskiego  w  Krakowie,  członek  wielu  Towarzystw
Naukowych  polskich  i  zagranicznych,  działacz  społeczny  i  kulturowy jest jednocześnie jedynym Polakiem, który dostąpił zaszczytu zasiadania w prezydium Association Internationale Schweitzer Lambaréné (AISL). Niesposób  zamknąć  w  kilku  zdaniach  obszarów  zainteresowań i działalności  Profesora  Henryka  Gaertnera,  aktywnego  w  sferach medycznej,    psychosomatycznej,    literackiej,    historyczno-medycznej, etyczno-filozoficznej,  kulturalnej,  oświatowej  czy  społecznej.  Z  tym większym  respektem  książkę  tę  redaktorzy  dedykują  swemu
ukochanemu  Profesorowi  z  prośbą  o  życzliwe  jej  przyjęcie  jako kolejnego głosu upominającego się o to, ażeby w życiu społecznymi, jak i  na  gruncie  opieki medycznej  były  obecne  wartości  głęboko humanistyczne.

gode di un'ammirazione universale e sostanzialmente incontrastata, ai suoi tempi la sua fama di compositore fu forse velata da quella di organista principe, come dimostra con eloquenza il fatto, per esempio, che i costruttori di organi avvertivano l'esigenza di ricorrere non di rado ai suoi consigli.

Die Bhagavadgītā avancierte über die letzten 200 Jahre zum wichtigsten Text des hinduistischen Kanons. Dabei wurde der philosophische Inhalt immer wieder politisiert, instrumentalisiert und teils gegensätzlich ausgelegt. Die vorliegende Arbeit erforscht ausführlich die Rezeptionsgeschichte des Textes und widmet sich abschließend der Frage, wie man mit solch einem Text im interkulturellen Zusammenhang umgehen soll.

One of the still unsolved problems in liberal anarchism is a definition of social constituency in positive terms. Partially, this had been solved by the advancements of liberal discourse ethics. These approaches, built on praxeology as a universal framework for social formation, are detached from the need of any previous or external authority or rule for the discursive partners. However, the relationship between action, personal identity, and liberty within the process of a community becoming solely generated from the praxeological a priori remains largely disputed. In order to develop a testable constitutional model, this study revises how the “ontological turn” was introduced into liberal theories and redefines the concept of liberty. Liberty is usually understood as a moral goal or measurement for just actions, as the generative principle of all social existence - individual and interpersonal. For this purpose, the function of performative contradiction within the mechanism of interpersonal “encounter”, as part of the co-generative process of the individual becoming and social formation was explored through the production of a game-based narrative historiography grounded on 19th century life writings. This narrative historiography was developed in the context of Swiss history, with a “design-based” research approach, and resulted in a prototype for networked storytelling through which the transformative learning process could be visible and the negotiation of competing individual visions of the future could be re-enacted.

Among the different understandings of the Spirit in the New Testament, Paul's Spirit language stands out for being at once dynamic and sometimes impersonal—inviting comparison with the Stoic notion of spirit (pneuma) as a substance. Volker Rabens re-examines Paul’s statements about the Spirit in the widest possible contexts and argues that the alleged parallels with Stoic conceptions are at best ambiguous. Paul understands the work of the Spirit relationally, Rabens argues, and it is through intimate relationships that the Spirit transforms and empowers people's lives.

The paper analyses the role of Albert Schweitzer in the antinuclear movement during the 1950s and 1960s. Having come face to face with the unthinkable threat of nuclear destruction, Schweitzer joins with renowned scientists to raise public awareness about the necessity of banning nuclear testing. Schweitzer applies the view summed up in the concept of reverence for life to a question of global importance, insisting on the personal responsibility of each individual for the present and future generations. His contribution to the antinuclear
movement also sheds light on the decisive role of the movement in the formation of the field of bioethics. In conclusion, the authoress points to the need for redefining the origins of bioethics.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, an increasing number of thinkers are referring to Schweitzer’s ethics of reverence for life. This is particularly useful and applicable with regard to ethical attitudes towards the environment. Immediately after the First World War, Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) diagnosed the decay of western civilization as a result of an excessive discrepancy between the material development of the world and man’s moral responsibility. To reform western civilization, he proposed the ethics of reverence for life, which is based on the fundamental experience of man: “I am life that wills to live, and I exist in the midst of life that wills to live.” Because man is indispensably connected to the surrounding living world, his moral responsibility extends to all living things. Schweitzer considered every being sacred, and therefore any destruction of life is an unethical act. The ethics of reverence for life, together with certain corrections and amendments, is also very relevant today in the search for answers to the challenges of the modern world.

This is a study of intellectual encounters with the figure of Christ during the European Enlightenment. In the first instance, it contributes to a body of research which has sought to revise the customary view in New Testament studies, that the historical study of Jesus began with the posthumous publication of Hermann Samuel Reimarus's Von dem Zwecke Jesu und seiner Junger (1778), the last in a series of Fragments published by G. E. Lessing. The thesis proposed here is that Reimarus’s writings on Jesus are a notable but relatively late entry, by the German intellectual establishment, into arguments about Jesus and Christian origins which had been raging across Europe for more than a century: arguments concerning history, morality and political theology.

Given the perpetual problem of the historical Jesus, there remains an ongoing posing of the question to and a continuous seeking of the meaningfulness of Christology. From the earliest reckoning with the relationship between Jesus of Nazareth and the Christ of faith, what it means to do Christology today remains at the methodological center of the task and scope of every systematic theology. Whether giving an account of Albert Schweitzer's bringing an end to the quest for the historical Jesus in 1906, or attending to Rudolf Bultmann's period of no quest culminating with his demythologization project in the 1940s, how we still think of Christology as a matter of questions and concerns with meaning speaks to an unavoidable philosophizing of Christology. In this way, The Philosophy of Christology offers both a particular history of Christology in conjunction with a particular philosophy of Christology, which assesses the theological contributions by a group of Bultmannians following Bultmann in the 1950s and 1960s up to what can be reimagined by repurposing Jacques Derrida's philosophical question into the meaning of love in 2002.

Et il, la tête bourdonnante de soleil (et quelquefois aussi de vin de Castelli), près du marbre brisé, assis sur le sol noir, souriant, somnolent et baigné par l’oubli, bouvait la force calme et violente de Rome. Juaqu’à la nuit tombante. Alors, le cœur étreint d’angoisse, il fuyait la solitude funèbre où la lumière tragique s’engloutissait... O terre, terre ardente, terre passionnée et muette! Sous ta paix fiévreuse, j’entends sonner encore les trompettes des légions. Quelles fureurs de vie grondent dans ta poitrine! Quel désir du réveil! Il trouva des âmes où brûlaient les tisons du feu séculaire. Sous la poussière des morts, ils s’étaient conservés.

Is Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), once judged to be among the best of us, relevant for today? Does his ethical philosophy and cultural vision have anything to say to our peculiar moment in history? What should we make of Schweitzer's awkward silences and apparent missteps on major political issues during his day? Do these disqualify him from speaking to the precarious position of our moment? What if we brought all of Schweitzer into variation, so that even the parts deemed ignoble by our current moment themselves judge the ethical styles of our moment? This shall be the aim of this essay via a coordination of Schweitzer's ethical mysticism, his publication of his "Paul" book, and the context of that Pauline return out of Africa. The essay considers these concerns before concluding with a few final observations on Schweitzer's silences and how they speak against our current ethical and political styles.

As the last great philosopher of the will, Albert Schweitzer rejected the radical individualism of Nietzsche and the pessimistic-mystical detachment of Schopenhauer, and instead sought to create a true social ethic. Schweitzer's particular contribution was to move further than Nietzsche to reconcile philosophy with natural science while simultaneously preserving and transforming the sense of mysticism and higher world-order principles from Schopenhauer. He joined this new cosmology to the virtue ethics of Aristotle, and recovered one key element of his ontology of becoming to transcend the Humean "is/ought" gap for ethics. The result is a philosophy that is as much biographical of Schweitzer himself as it is systematic. This result is both the strength and greatest weakness of his reverence for life ethic. It is tailor-made for contemporary environmental ethics: it has applications in many strands of environmental thought, including deep ecology, ecofeminism, and ecotheology, and may attract considerable interest from environmental movements that seek to cultivate deep personal conviction.

Albert Schweitzer (1875–1965) was a fascinating person, a multivalent icon, mostly known as a doctor in the primeval forest of Africa. There he elaborated the ethics of boundless responsibility towards all living beings as a treatment for the restoration of a decadent civilization. Until his death, Schweitzer was struggling to elaborate a worldview of reverence for life that would be embraced by all religions and cultures. His ethics should be universally true for all people, regardless of time, place, or cultural background. In this article we present his worldview of reverence of life in a critical way. It will be emphasized that Schweitzer was not aware enough that his philosophy was culturally, religiously, historically, and also personally (biographically) conditioned, since it is impossible for anybody to step out of his or her historical and cultural backgrounds. He limited his ethical reflection to the individual sphere and did not allow for any ranking among living beings on a theoretical level. Despite these critical observations, reflection of the immediate experience of the human condition could be in our opinion a good starting point to understand the shared common morality of all humans. We are convinced that his ethical thoughts and seeing him as a role model can stimulate the search for global ethics today.

The Reverence for Life Worldview as the Basis for a Global Ethics

Regarding the current crisis conditions, we are looking for a global ethics. This paper investi- gates Albert Schweitzer’s reverence for life worldview as a possible contribution to the develop- ment of such ethics. With his project at the beginning of the 20th century, Schweitzer wanted to renew the devastated Western culture. Man must experience himself as “a life in the midst of life”. As biological nature cannot be the source for ethics, it is referred to the will to love which man discovers in himself and which, due to the attitude of reverence, obliges him for sustaining and promoting all life. With the active mysticism of reverence for life Schweitzer intended to develop a universal foundation of all ethics, but the intention was inadequate. In the author’s opinion, although his worldview can hardly be considered “logically necessary” – as he tries to demonstrate – it is still highly relevant as an inspiration and motivation in the contemporary crisis condition.

Like Philo and Josephus, as well as those who earlier produced the Septuagint and the Hellenistic Jewish fragmentary texts, the writers of the New Testament were Jews writing in Greek. They may have been articulating and promoting a particular form of Jewish messianism that eventually became a distinctive form of religious belief, but in the first and early second centuries, those Christ-followers who were writing in various genres operated with many of the same assumptions as their Jewish counterparts in the land of Israel and in other places such as Alexandria and Rome. This collection of essays, spanning the scholarly career of Carl R. Holladay, investigates the Hellenistic Jewish writings in their own contexts and explores how they illuminate the writings of the New Testament. Included are six new essays on such topics as Hellenistic Judaism, the Beatitudes, and Luke-Acts.

This essay explores how the principles of ahimsa and reverence for life provide a foundation for animal welfare in the thought of Mohandas Gandhi and Albert Schweitzer, respectively. This exploration unfolds through a consideration of the contextual background of both thinkers, the scope of life to which they apply their respective principles, and both the ethical ramifications and limitations of this application. Within this common framework, the author delineates the striking commonalities and the significant disparities between Gandhi and Schweitzer. This comparison opens a common space within which ecologically-minded Hindus and Christians can dialogue, augmenting each other's positions by drawing on respected thinkers in their traditions. It also provides an opportunity, within the tensions highlighted at the intersection of Gandhi and Schweitzer's thought, to further construct a foundation for animal welfare in contemporary discussions.

Albert Schweitzer died 50 years ago, leaving the world his philosophy of ‘reverence for life’. In the month of his death, James Lovelock formulated his Gaia hypothesis. These two male scholars were hardly aware of each other’s existence so did not engage with each other’s viewpoints. However, a woman called Rachel Carson dedicated her book Silent Spring (1962) to Schweitzer. Lovelock took cognisance of her opinions, as he too had become aware of human interference with the ecology of the planet. Lynn Margulis soon came out in support of Lovelock’s view that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system but emphasised the role of microorganisms in creating a habitable environment for larger forms of life. The year 1965 is important for another reason: John A.T. Robinson published his book The New Reformation? in that year. Lloyd Geering promoted Robinson’s perspectives, eventually becoming a staunch supporter of the ‘greening’ of Christianity. Don Cupitt is well-known for his conviction that Christianity is in need of reform, and he maintains that Church Christianity is being overtaken by a ‘religion of Life’. Although his publications do not reflect direct influence by Schweitzer or Lovelock, it is evident that his theology of Life is in line with the ‘greening’ of Christianity. This observation applies also to the feminist theologians Anne Primavesi and Rosemary Radford Ruether. They too refrain from referring to Schweitzer’s philosophy and do not promote a new reformation, but their feminist stance and their embracing of the Gaia hypothesis show that they are at home in the ‘greening’ of Christianity. The article argues a case for the shift in our religious vocabulary over the past fifty years from God-centred to Life-centred vocabulary. This can be traced back via the abovementioned scholars to Schweitzer and his philosophy of ‘reverence for life’.

Graue Edition 2006, 7-11 Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965 ist bekannt: als berühmter Deutscher, als Theologe und selbstloser "Urwalddoktor" und durch seinen unermüdlichen Einsatz für Frieden und Gerechtigkeit, der ihm 1952 schließlich den Friedensnobelpreis einbrachte. Von seiner Philosophie hingegen ist wenig die Rede. Man weiß immerhin, daß Schweitzer die "Ehrfurcht vor allem Leben" predigte, was zwar eindrucksvoll, aber auch wenig realistisch wirkt. Wie soll man auch vor allem, was lebt, Ehrfurcht empfinden, oder wenn man es doch tut, was soll man mit einer solchen Ehrfurcht praktisch anfangen? Eine Ethik ,die sich auch in die Tat umsetzen ließe, läßt sich auf einem solchen Prinzip nicht begründen. So lautet jedenfalls das fast einhellige Urteil der akademischen Philosophie. Als guter Mensch kommt Schweitzer knapp hinter Mutter Theresa zu stehen, aber als Philosoph, meinen viele, ist er nicht ernst zu nehmen. Die Annahme einer "unbegrenzten Verantwortung" für alles Leben sei weder rational begründbar noch auch nur lebbar. Denn wie sollte es immer schlecht sein können, Leben zu vernichten, wenn uns doch gar nichts anderes übrig bleibt? Denn wir können ja selbst nur leben, indem wir Leben nehmen. Können wir also Schweitzers Ethik getrost vergessen? Ob dem tatsächlich so ist oder ob diese Ethik nicht vielmehr durchaus auch als tragfähiger philosophischer Ansatz und damit auch Schweitzer selbst als Philosoph ernst genommen zu werden verdient, sollte eine Tagung zeigen, die am 21. und 22. Januar 2006 im Leibniz-Haus Hannover stattgefunden hat. 1 Dabei lag der Schwerpunkt naturgemäß auf der Ethik, aber auch andere Aspekte von Schweitzers vielschichtigem Werk wurden angesprochen und diskutiert. Geleitet wurde die Veranstaltung von der Vermutung, daß Schweizer entgegen der üblichen Auffassung nicht nur ein radikaler, sondern auch darüber hinaus auch ein konsistenter Denker war und daß die vielen Anregungen, die sein Werk zu geben vermag, eingebettet sind in ein in sich stimmiges Gedankengebäude, das den Vergleich mit anderen philosophischen Ansätzen nicht zu scheuen braucht. Dagegen spricht freilich, daß Schweitzer selten überhaupt als Philosoph wahrgenommen wird, was allerdings auch daran liegen mag, daß er sich in so vielen Bereichen betätigt und ausgezeichnet hat: als Theologe, Organist, Musikwissenschaftler, Arzt und Menschenfreund. Die Philosophie aber hat ihn schon früh in ihren Bann gezogen und zeitlebens begleitet. Schon im Gymnasium lernte er die Klassiker der Philosophie kennen und beschäftigte sich ausführlich mit Nietzsche und Schopenhauer. Er studierte in Straßburg bei dem neukantianischen Philosophiehistoriker Wilhelm Windelband (1848-1915), dann in Paris an der Sorbonne, wo er sich 1898 bei Ziegler mit einer Arbeit über Kants Religionsphilosophie promoviert und schließlich in Berlin. Das Angebot einer Habilitation in Philosophie, die ihn schließlich zum ordentlichen Philosophieprofessor gemacht hätte, lehnte er vor allem deshalb ab, weil er fürchtete, dann nicht mehr predigen zu können. Obwohl Schweitzer der Glaube selbstverständlich nicht fremd war, betont er in seinen Schriften doch immer wieder die große Bedeutung des Denkens. Ob es um die Schärfung des ethischen Bewußtsein geht oder darum, den Weg zu bestimmen, den wir gehen müssen, um den von Schweitzer diagnostizierten Verfall der Kultur aufzuhalten und rückgängig zu machen: immer sind wir dazu aufgerufen, "wahrhaft denkend" zu werden. Der Glaube und das Gefühl, so wichtig sie sind, sind doch für sich genommen unzureichend; sie können dem Denken nur als Anknüpfungspunkte dienen: "Die Begeisterung, die aus dem Denken kommt, verhält sich zu der, die aus wirren Gefühlen besteht, wie der Wind der ragenden Höhen zu dem, der zwischen Hügeln weht." 2 Das Denken aber, das hier gemeint ist, ist ein genuin philosophisches Denken. Vor dem Verfall der Kultur und, was für Schweitzer beinahe dasselbe ist, dem Verlust wahrer Menschlichkeit kann uns seiner Ansicht nach nur die Philosophie 2 Albert Schweitzer, Kultur und Ethik. Kulturphilosophie Zweiter Teil, München: C.H. Becksche Verlagsbuchhandlung 1923, S. 55. bewahren, die "ihrer letzten Bestimmung nach" nichts anderes ist als die "Anführerin und Wächterin der allgemeinen Vernunft." 3 Dieser Rolle muß die Philosophie freilich auch erst einmal gerecht werden. Mit anderen Worten, sie muß sich rückhaltlos als praktische Disziplin verstehen, deren Augabe nicht etwa die bloße Kontemplation ist (was die Griechen theoria nannten), also die überlegene Schau auf die Welt vom Standpunkt des unbeteiligten Beobachters aus. Nicht dem Erreichen eines Zustandes gleichmütiger Einsicht in das Wesen der Welt soll die Philosophie dienen, also dem, was üblicherweise Weisheit genannt wird, sondern der Orientierung in der Welt. Das Denken ist wichtig, aber es ist kein Selbstzweck. Es ist nur der Weg, der zu einem dem Menschen angemessenen Tätigsein führt. Darum wollte Schweitzer auch immer mehr sein als "nur ein Weiser", wie es seiner Meinung nach Schopenhauer war, was, obwohl Schweitzer ohne Zweifel viel von Schopenhauer gelernt hat, keinesfalls als Kompliment gemeint war. 4 Vielleicht erklärt diese starke Ausrichtung am Praktischen auch die oft gerügten Vagheiten in Schweitzers Begriffen und Argumentation. Für theoretische Nuancen hatte er wenig Sinn. Weder strebte er nach einer stichhaltigen, logisch zwingenden Letztbegründung seiner Ansichten, noch lag ihm viel an analytischer Klarheit oder einem durchgearbeiteten, möglichst nach allen Seiten abgesicherten System. In der

Hugo von Hofmannsthal was distinct from the other contemporary Viennese writers. Since Hofmannsthal studied Romanic Literature at the University of Vienna, he could peruse Latin, French, Spanish, Italian, Provençal textes at will. In all likelihood, Ernst Robert Curtius alone could apprehend this well-bred pan-European aspect of Hofmannsthal. This paper analyzes the Hofmannsthal's reception of the Romantic culture, referring to two critical works by Curtius - Zu Hofmannsthals Gedächtnis (1929) and  George, Hofmannsthal und Calderón (1934). Curtius insists that Venice was an Austrian territory between the Napoleon's occupation and Italian unification in the 19th century and meaning of Venice for Hofmannsthal resembles the one that Rome had for Goethe, the Ligurian Riviera for Nietzsche, or Florence for George. Hofmannsthal had a strong interest, probably influenced Walter Pater, in a Venetian Painting Concerto campestre, whose atmosphere a rococo painter Watteau inherited. Though the example of Hofmannsthal, the author of this paper seeks to combine the Venetian aristocratic culture with the rococo the ancient régime in France. It is characteristic of Curtius to attach the importance to Spanish literature in Europe. Although the Spanish baroque dramatists (e.g., Calderón) had an influence on the works of Hofmannsthal, the relationship between Habsburgian Austria and Habsburgian Spain has not been widely discussed until now. He also indicates the catholic and baroque aspects of Paul Claudel in Die literarischen Wegbereiter des neuen Frankreich (1919) that Walter Benjamin highly estimated. We insist on the importance of similar interest to Calderón that Hofmannsthal and Claudel shared and Curtius has pointed out separately. In conclusion, we can indicate the transition of Curtius from aristocratism to mysticism, by comparing these two critical works.

Der Beitrag widmet sich dem von Albert Schweitzer entworfenen Bild indischer und chinesischer Religionen.  Die
Problemstellung wird in zwei Schritten vorgenommen. Zunächst erfolgt ein chronologisch geordneter Überblick über die Inhalte der wichtigsten einschlägigen Schriften Albert Schweitzers. Im zweiten Schritt wird dann diskutiert, ob die heutige Auseinandersetzung mit den asiatischen Religionen von den Vorarbeiten Schweitzers profitieren kann.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, an increasing number of thinkers are referring to Schweitzer's ethics of reverence for life. This is particularly useful and applicable with regard to ethical attitudes towards the environment. Immediately after the First World War, Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965) diagnosed the decay of western civilization as a result of an excessive discrepancy between the material development of the world and man's moral responsibility. To reform western civilization, he proposed the ethics of reverence for life, which is based on the fundamental experience of man: "I am life that wills to live, and I exist in the midst of life that wills to live." Because man is indispensably connected to the surrounding living world, his moral responsibility extends to all living things. Schweitzer considered every being sacred, and therefore any destruction of life is an unethical act. The ethics of reverence for life, together with certain corrections and amendments, is also very relevant today in the search for answers to the challenges of the modern world.

Wie viel Freiheit verträgt und braucht Theologie? Philosophisch-numismatische Anmerkungen zu den Bedingungen der Möglichkeit theologischer Liberalität, in: Jörg Lauster, Ulrich Schmiedel und Peter Schüz (Hg.): Liberale Theologie heute / Liberal Theology Today, Tübingen 2019, S. 275-288

This article argues that the quests for the historical Jesus have largely operated with an understanding of history hindered by a severely constricted range of divine and human possibilities. By outlining human ‘self-understanding’ as a historiographical question, it emphasises the determinative role in historical judgement played by the historian's assumptions about the range of possibility available to the processes of human thought. Highlighting three particular concerns that historians tend to connect to ‘docetism’, it suggests a couple of ways that metaphysical and theological forms of reasoning could expand the horizon of possibilities available to historical Jesus scholarship in a way that will augment access to the historical figure of Jesus.

Read here: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/scottish-journal-of-theology/article/selfunderstanding-of-jesus-a-metaphysical-reading-of-historical-jesus-studies/39A47B922E1621B2A730713F4776766D/share/e738aba4cac4615f44cdc102657acb040ebb1db7

The activities of the Polish Society of Albert Schweitzer of Poznań

The text describes of the story of the beginnings and presence of the Schweitzer's ideas in. Poznan. Authors with great attention to the facts presents to the reader the the idea of rooting process of Schweitzer's ideas in Poznan. Paper is written by the founders of the Polish Society of Albert Schweitzer in Poznan, which are aware of the magnitude of difficulties related to the protection of the value of the humanities in medical care. Polish Society of Albert Schweitzer in Poznan started its activities in 2010. However, earlier, there was unofficially operating Circle of Albert Schweitzer's Friends, at University of Medical Sciences. Their members began to promote the Schweitzer's ideas . The beginning of their activity was the organization of the conference "Pattern of medical ethics in the light of the life and work of Albert Schweitzer", which took place on March 16 2007
.
Die Tätigkeit des Polnischen Albert Schweitzer Gesellschaft in Posen

Der Text enthält Informationen über die Geschichte und Gegenwart der schweitzeriche Gedanken in Posen. Die Autoren, die Gründer der polnischen Albert Schweitzer Gesellschaft in Posen, zeigen bei dieser Gelegenheit auf das Bedürfnis die humanistischen Werte in der ärztliche Betreuung und in der Arbeit mit einem Patienten zu versetzen. Die Gesellschaft hat seine Tätigkeit in 2010 Jahr angefangen, aber die Treffen des Freundeskreises des Alberts Schweitzer haben schon regelmäßig seit 2007 Jahr in der medizinischen Universität in Posen stattgefunden. Auf Grund dieser Handeln hat die schweitzeriche Gedanke in Posen sich wiederbelebt. Der letzte Teil des Kapitels enthält die Basisinformationen auf das Thema der Gesellschaft sowie die Kontaktdaten mit Logo.

The Quests for the Historical Jesus resulted in a move “back to the Jewish roots!” Jewish Jesus research positioned Jewry within a dominantly Christian culture and permitted Jews to feel more at ease with Jesus the Jew. Christians are challenged to respond now with a new Christology.

My goal is to examine Schweitzer's classic text The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle to see what aid, if any, it might give in identifying a Pauline contribution to those theological currents developing in the face of the climate crisis. If biblical studies in general, and apocalypticism in particular, have traditionally ignored, skewed or downplayed human relations to the natural world, is there an under-explored Pauline cosmology to which we might now appeal in helping Paul join the movement? Does Tarsus (via Alsace) have anything to contribute to the Climate Strike? This article is a decade old, and I'd change a few things now, but I'm recycling it in honour of the day:

The rabbi and professor of Jewish theology and interreligious dialogue at Potsdam university, Walter Homolka, leads the reader through 2000 years of Christian-Jewish conflicts in behalf of Jesus as historical person and as Jesus the Christ. The critical research of Jesus as Jew by Jewish scholars has openend new insights and are clear challenges for christologies which have been often dominated by a colonial behaviour against the Jews. During the last 50 years the situation has slowly changed.  The emphasis on Christ as Messiah remains problematically, but the covenant between God and his people may become a bridge between Jews and Christians. Fair-minded dialogue can only be effective if the partners discuss as truly equal partners.