Center for the Study of Paradoxes
The Center for the Study of Paradoxes explores contradictions, challenges, absurdities, nonsense or ambiguities in human life. The center conducts research into these issues of human existence, while also serving as a center for study and resources. The center offers consultancy projects of various size as well as public academic presentations, talks, workshops, and one-on-one conversations.
- The study of existence and lifestyle
- The study of Church and liturgy
- The study of social reality and innovation
The center’s approach to existence and lifestyle focuses on lifestyle as an expression of intersubjective, embodied and perceptual characteristics that often complicates, or even escapes, our understanding and thus questions our language and approaches to existence. This approach integrates and yet distinguishes itself from a recent hermeneutical engagement with human existence, which has predominately, focused on self-consciousness, knowledge and language. Presently the center is engaged in a number of concrete case studies as well as paradigmatic lifestyle paradoxes such as the contradictions between self-consciousness and forms of living, between knowledge and action, and between conscious and unconscious aspects of lifestyle
This approach engages Christian practices and liturgical practices as forms of life that are embodied, mediated and perceived, and experienced as ambiguous or even contradictory. The center’s approach presupposes that the Christian forms of communication cannot be isolated from their existential and societal contexts. This approach studies and analyzes in particular Protestant ecclesial and liturgical communication in its varied forms by drawing on the history of liturgical practice, ecclesial sociology and theory of ritual practice: i.e. church services, the handling of sacraments and other ecclesial practices. Thus the approach entails the study of a number of paradoxes related to the Christian practice and communication, such as the tension between presence and absence, the distinction between form and matter, and between direct and indirect communication as well as the tensions between distinct forms of communication such as the use of analog and digital media.
The center’s approach to the study of social reality and innovation presupposes the vision of society as a human community and innovation is an expression of society’s engagement with the contradictions that shape it. This approach seeks to clarify which contradictions prevent innovation and development and which contradictions promote innovation and development. The approach entails that social contradictions do not necessarily prevent innovation, but may, in certain instances, further it. The approach engages paradoxes related to innovation and development and problems such as the tension between society and the individual, between past and future, between normativity and experience (gender, sex, religion, class, race, weight and age) and, in particular, between children and adults.
Researchers
Name | Title | Phone | |
---|---|---|---|
Search in Name | Search in Title | Search in Phone | |
Kristensen, Anne-Milla Wichmann | PhD Fellow | +4535337882 | |
Amlund, Dina | PhD Student | +4535321062 | |
Kristensen, Johanne Stubbe T | Associate Professor | ||
Enggaard, Nete Helene | Associate Professor | +4535337075 | |
Baark, Sigurd | Guest Researcher | ||
Drigsdahl, Tina Folke | PhD Student | +4535334695 |
Contact
Johanne Stubbe T Kristensen
Associate Professor
Center for the Study of Paradoxes
Faculty of Theology
Karen Blixens Plads 16
København S
Mobile: +45 40 45 09 14
E-mail: jst@teol.ku.dk
Nete Helene Enggaard
Associate Professor
Center for the Study of Paradoxes
Faculty of Theology
Karen Blixens Plads 16
København S
Phone: +45 35 33 70 75
E-mail: nhe@teol.ku.dk