Walled City in Autumn Landscape, Wassily Kandinsky, 1902 (SOURCE: WIKIART.ORG)
CURRENT PROJECTS
Phenomenology and Bodily Affect
Project Lead: Dr Calvin D Ullrich
This project explores how the body can be rethought within contemporary theology and philosophy. Drawing on phenomenology and affect theory, it investigates how bodily experience is shaped not only by conscious thought, but also by emotions, sensations, and social forces that influence human life in often unseen ways. The project places these insights in dialogue with Christian theology, examining how traditional concepts such as sin and grace might be understood through a renewed account of embodied existence. By bringing philosophical and theological perspectives into conversation, the research offers new ways of thinking about human vulnerability, transformation, and flourishing in a world marked by inequality, violence, and social change.
Affective Communities: Faith, Life, and the Church
Project Lead: Dr Calvin D Ullrich
South Africa’s democratic context is characterised by shifting and often contested relationships between religious and secular forms of public life. At the same time, faith communities operate within an increasingly plural and diverse religious landscape. This project responds to these developments by developing new conceptual and intellectual resources for understanding how religious communities are formed, sustained, and transformed. The Affective Communities project draws on recent developments in the critical humanities, phenomenology, psychoanalytic theory, religious studies, and theology. Rather than undertaking empirical community-based research, it advances a conceptual framework for analysing the role of affect, emotion, and embodiment in religious life. Building on the broader “material turn” in contemporary scholarship, the project examines how communities are constituted not only through beliefs, doctrines, and texts, but also through affective dynamics that shape collective identities, practices, relationships, and forms of belonging. Through sustained theoretical engagement with the concepts of life, faith, and community, the project seeks to deepen scholarly understanding of social and religious coexistence. Its contribution lies in generating new conceptual tools for the study of religion and society, strengthening interdisciplinary scholarship in South Africa, and providing resources that can inform future research, public discourse, and policy conversations concerning social cohesion, diversity, identity, and democratic life.
Religious Communities in Historical Perspective
Project Lead: Dr Pascal Pienaar
This project investigates the formation of religious identity, vocation, and community in Southern Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on archival research, it examines the role of educational institutions, missionary networks, and congregational life in shaping religious belonging and leadership. Particular attention is given to the emergence of women’s missionary vocations at the Huguenot Seminary and to the ways Lutheran communities navigated social disruption during periods of war and political change. The project contributes to historical understandings of religion, gender, community formation, and the enduring influence of faith traditions in Southern African society.
Hope and Development
Project Lead: Prof John Klaasen
This project investigates the notions of hope within religious and secular discourses and how it fosters and/or thwarts development. The research recognises the two kinds of hope – false and true hope - and the strands within the biblical tradition. The critique towards the concept and approaches to development are taken seriously. For that reason, the variety and complexity of both hope and development are taken seriously. Theological notions such as Creation, Imago Dei and Prophet are particularly investigated as theological resources for vocation, calling and proclamation. The question is what role does hope play in these theological meanings to address the poly-crises of poverty, inequality, ecology, war, and of identities within contemporary societies.