SFB 1475:  Metaphors of Religion. Religious Meaning-Making in Language Use

• Subject Area: Humanities
• Term: since 2022
• Website: Homepage
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 441126958

Religious meaning-making occurs in and through metaphors. In metaphors, meaning is trans-ferred from one semantic domain to another. Religion, which cannot directly address its ultimate subject (the transcendent), is dependent on this procedure. The CRC seeks to more thoroughly understand this process theoretically and grasp it methodologically to research its semantic forms empirically and comparatively. The shapes religion takes as a socio-cultural phenomenon are thus better understood and central developments within specific religious traditions become more tangible. The CRC contributes to the historiography of religions, on the one hand, and to answering systematic questions in the comparative study of religions, on the other.While extensive research on metaphors in religious texts exists, the CRC’s novel approach lies, first, in its systematic focus on metaphoricity as the central principle of religious meaning-making. Religion is understood as the form of communication that has the function of coping with ulti-mate contingency by means of the transcendence/immanence distinction. In this paradoxical process, the metaphor is used to infer the unknown (target domain) from known means (source domain) and in this way creates religious meaning.Second, the CRC’s multidisciplinary composition allows for comparative studies on an unprece-dented scale in the field. The subprojects cover multiple religious traditions, including Christiani-ty, Islam, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, Jainism, Buddhism, and Daoism. Their geographical foci cov-er Europe, the Near and Middle East, South, Central, and East Asia. The time frame ranges from 3,000 BCE to the present day. The structuring of the subprojects in three sections is based on the elementary linguistic domains, ‘The Physical’, ‘The Mind’, and ‘The Social.’Thirdly, the CRC is integrated through a shared methodological workbench, most notably an instrument for metaphor annotation used in all subprojects, complementing hermeneutic inter-pretation on the one hand and computational analysis on the other. In pilot projects, computa-tional methods will be further developed, tailored to the CRC’s needs, and gradually implement-ed in further subprojects. The research corpora will be integrated into a shared repository and all identified metaphors will be linked with a ‘Thesaurus of Religious Metaphors’ (TRM). This will be both a central result of the CRC and a crucial tool for further comparative work across the sub-projects and beyond.In the first funding phase, the CRC will concentrate on the empirical analysis of textual material. However, a working group will explore the relationship between metaphors and material objects and develop methodological approaches. In future funding phases of this CRC, we also aim to advance the theoretical conceptualization in the broader context of religious sign processes and develop new and innovative tools for their analysis.

• DFG Programme: Collaborative Research Centres

Current projects

• A01 - Path and guidance: Interpretations of Qur’anic metaphors of space and move-ment in the Tafsīr literature (Project Head Büssow, Johann )
• A02 - The kinesis of immortality. Spatial-kinetic metaphors and Daoist salvation (Project Head Di Giacinto, Ph.D., Licia )
• A03 - Metaphors and their semantic fields in texts of the ‘experience instruction’ gen-res of Tibetan Buddhism (Project Head Meinert, Carmen )
• A04 - Metaphorizing the metaphors: The development of the Zoroastrian language of eschatology (Project Head Rezania, Kianoosh )
• B01 - Jesus and Mary as divine healers in service for the salvation of the faithful: A mixed-method analysis of medical metaphorizations in Medieval German texts (Project Heads Dipper, Stefanie ;  Elwert, Frederik )
• B02 - Beyond self-cultivation: Moments of transcendence in ego-documents of Kore-an Confucian provenance (Project Head Eggert, Marion )
• B03 - Metaphors of the self: On the connection between self-constitution and religion in the Hebrew Bible (Project Head Frevel, Christian )
• B04 - The human body as metaphor of the divine: Anthropomorphism in South Asian religious traditions (Project Head Pons, Jessie )
• B05 - Embodiment outside the body? Out-of-body experiences in a cognitive and so-cial science perspective (Project Head Krech, Volkhard )
• C01 - Grammar as a religious metaphor (Project Head Glei, Reinhold F. )
• C03 - Metaphors of everyday life (Project Head Simonis, Linda )
• C04 - Metaphor and social positioning in religious online forums (Project Heads Elwert, Frederik ;  Scheffler, Tatjana )
• INF - Metaphor Base Camp: Providing the common data basis and advancing digital research methods for religious metaphors (Project Heads Dipper, Stefanie ;  Elwert, Frederik ;  Krech, Volkhard ;  Tonne, Danah )
• MGK - Integrated research training group: Graduate school of metaphor and religion (GSMR) (Project Head Rezania, Kianoosh )
• PRÖ - Religion and metaphor in contemporary media realities: What can we learn from the humanities? (Project Head Karis, Tim )
• Z - Central Tasks of the Collaborative Research Center (Project Head Krech, Volkhard )

• Applicant Institution: Ruhr-Universität Bochum
• Participating Institution: Karlsruher Institut für Technologie (KIT); Scientific Computing Center
• Spokesperson: Professor Dr. Volkhard Krech