The City of Hope and the Garden of Life. A Protestant Ethics of Sustainability

The objective of this project is the finalization of a volume on Protestant ethics of sustainability which draws on more than 15 years of inter- and transdisciplinary research into the field. It follows a methodology suggested by the paradigm of public theology concerned with the reflection on the public dimension of religious discourse and the religious dimension of public discourse. Identifying religious motives in academic and political sustainability discourse, it accepts the challenge presented to Protestant ethics by that discourse to articulate its normative doctrinal insights in a way not only informing members of its own community of faith, but open for an overlapping normative consensus. As questions of sustainability play out in a field of conflict and struggles for economic and political power, the awareness of the situatedness of ethical reflection amidst such conflict is of crucial importance.