We live in a world of crises. In the light of geopolitical and internal social upheavals and an intensifying ecological crisis, societies and individuals feel compelled to relinquish some cherished certainties and self-evident truths and to develop new designs and visions of collective and individual life. This always also means working through those traditional ideas and concepts of a good communal life that once appeared to offer reliable support and guidance, and understanding how such ideas and concepts are themselves not crisis-proof entities; they are themselves affected by the crises of our present.

In some respect, the crisis of our world is a crisis of our words. This crisis is by no means new: ideas and concepts are constantly undergoing transformations, and they regularly do so in a crisis-like manner. The point of our project is to combine two aspects of crisis(es): to take exemplary crises that are shaking our world today and relate these to equally exemplary crises of concepts that people reach for in order to find support and orientation.

Against this background, colleagues from Glasgow, Stirling and Mainz, supported by the Georg Forster Forum in cooperation with the Royal Society of Edinburgh, have embarked on a project that combines conceptual-historical, theological-hermeneutical and contemporary-diagnostic perspectives. A first workshop meeting took place in Glasgow in August 2024, a second workshop meeting took place in March 2025 in Mainz.

Sub-projects of the Scottish-German research project are related to the overarching themes a) practices of repair (consolation, forgiveness), b) visions of change (humility, frugality) and c) horizons of coherence (kindness, politeness, mankind, spirit).

Participants

• Eva Baillie
• Cornelia Dockter-Verscharen
• Andrew Hass
• Alison Jasper
• David Jasper
• Ulrike Peisker
• Jochen Schmidt
• Samuel Shearn
• Jeremy Smith
• Heather Walton