Public lecture Hanna Reichel: Against Humanity

Photo by Kevin Birch

About the lecture

Humanity! The very idea promises dignity, wholeness, participation, belonging. It thus has played an important function in struggles for rights and recognition. But is the price of its universality the dehumanization of whatever – whoever! – is signified as non-human? Christian theology, especially in its Western forms, has a history of elevating the human being at the expense of the rest of creation, and of judging some people as closer to the ideal of “true humanity” than others. But it also offers models to think the human being as a creature among creatures, ontologically radically distinguished only from two different others: On the one side, God as the true and “wholly Other,” on the other side only “nothingness” as the realm of non-creation and non-being. Can such a model make good on the promise of true universality, or is it doomed to repeat the exclusions and damnations that haunt humanity?

About the speaker

Hanna Reichel is Charles Hodge Professor of Systematic Theology at Princeton Theological Seminary (US). Reichel published the books Theologie als Bekenntnis: Karl Barths kontextuelle Lektüre des Heidelberger Katechismus (2015) and After Method: Queer Grace, Conceptual Design, and the Possibility of Theology (2023). 

Time and place

• Time: 20.00 CET
• Location: Janskerk, Janskerkhof, Utrecht

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