[JFKI-News] WG: Guest lecture in JFKI

[John-F.-Kennedy Institute <administration@jfki.fu-berlin.de>]

Invitation to the guest lecture on Nov. 27, Wed. 4-6pm

Address: Lansstraße 7-9, JFKI, Freie Universität Berlin. Room 201
 
As part of the course "American Christianities and Migrant Faiths", we're inviting you to the guest lecture given by Maren Freudenberg (Center for Religious Studies, Ruhr-Universität Bochum)
 
Title of the talk: "Transformations in the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America in the Early Twenty-First Century".
 
American Mainline Protestantism has been in steep decline for at least the past three decades, but a closer look reveals that it is far from simply dying out. Instead, mirroring broader trends in the American religious landscape, denominations such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) are selectively adopting certain pietistic elements out of conservative Evangelicalism and incorporating these into the confessional tradition. The talk sketches the most prominent changes in the ELCA as became evident in first-hand qualitative doctoral research conducted in 2013 and 2014 in the Upper Midwest, and relates these finding to fundamental shifts in American religion since the 1980s.
 
Maren Freudenberg holds a PhD degree in sociology from Freie Universität Berlin, where she was a doctoral student at the Graduate School of North American Studies from 2012 to 2016. Since 2016, she has been a research associate at the Center for Religious Studies (CERES) at Ruhr-Universität Bochum, where she teaches MA and BA courses on religion in America, sociological theory, and applied qualitative methods. She is also associate editor of Entangled Religions, Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Religious Contact and Transfer. In her postdoctoral research, she focuses on charismatic Christian currents in German-speaking Europe that have come across the Atlantic from the US and/or are inspired by American Evangelicalism. As of December 2019, she will be the academic coordinator of the Graduate School Religious Plurality and its Regulation in the Region at the CERES in Bochum and the Center for Religion and Modernity at the University of Münster.
 

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Best regards,

Kseniya Medvedeva

 

Graduate School of North American Studies, FU Berlin

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