Edition of Tillich’s Lectures on Religion and Culture

In this FWF-funded hybrid edition project, Paul Tillichs (1886-1965) important lectures on Religion and Culture, which he gave at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. in 1955/56, will be made available to researchers for the first time in a digital open-access and print edition. Since no manuscript of Tillichs lecture has survived and probably does not exist, a transcript of the lectures and the available materials from Tillichs estate will be edited. The project is based on three pillars: 1. digital edition of all surviving sources; 2. scholarly indexing of the sources and 3. print edition with selected sources from the lecture Religion and Culture. Paul Tillich, who had to emigrate to the USA in 1933 and taught at the Union Theological Seminary in New York until his retirement in 1955, was appointed University Professor at Harvard University in the same year. In the winter semester of 1955/56 and the summer semester of 1956, he held his lecture Religion and Culture here, parts of which he repeated in subsequent years both at Harvard and at other US universities. The lecture is the most comprehensive on the subject of religion and culture from Tillichs late phase. As he himself put it, it offers the result of his lifelong cultural theological reflections, the beginnings of which go back to the time after the First World War. Tillichs lectures on Religion and Culture present a comprehensive presentation of his understanding of religion and culture, which encompasses religious-philosophical, religious-sociological, aesthetic, political and psychological dimensions. The digital edition of the lecture Religion and Culture closes a significant gap in previous research. No such comprehensive text on his cultural theology from Tillichs later years is known to date. His edition, using digital editing technology, makes it possible to reconstruct Tillichs late work on cultural theology in the USA in an appropriate scholarly way within the horizon of the history of his work.