Karl Baier – författare

Religious traditions tend to consider a purely cognitive understanding of their holy scriptures as being insufficient. Different spiritual exercises function as preparation for grasping the deeper meaning of the texts. The oldest forms of interpretation are connected to ritual, meditation and prayer.On the other hand, quite early on, a process of differentiation began to separate interpretation and spiritual practice. Important sections of the explanation of authoritative texts were being relocated within institutions of higher education. This resulted in a tension between religious reading and scientific reading.This volume brings together an array of specialists who analyze the relation between spiritual practice and the scientific reading of holy texts in Hinduism, Buddhism and Christianity. In addition to detailed historical analyses, particular attention is paid to the significance of contemplative exegesis in contemporary Christian theology.

This anthology deals with the work of Augustinus Wucherer-Huldenfelds, one of Austria''s most prominent philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st century. His thinking sets out from initial human experience by way of a newly conceived phenomenological hermeneutical method. Wucherer-Huldenfeld develops a fundamental ontology that takes European conceptions of ''thinking of being'' and ''thinking of origin'' further and merges them into a philosophical theology and religious philosophy. The contributors deal with what according to Wucherer-Huldenfeld''s philosophy is an essential relationship between thoughts on existence, ontology and theology, as well as topics from the fields of ethics and morality, philosophy of language and the phenomenology of knowledge, therapy and aesthetics, and also religion, atheism research and spirituality. The anthology demonstrates that the work of the Austrian philosopher is a source of interdisciplinary richness and international appeal that is seldom encountered in the research landscape.