The Impact of Academic Research On Character Formation, Ethical Education, and the Communication of Values in Late Modern Pluralistic Societies

This volume addresses whether, how, and where academic research has an impact on ethical education, character formation, and the communication of values in late modern pluralistic societies. It reflects the great impacts of a global network of research universities, with an enormous range of exact, social, and humane sciences, and sundry forms of professional training in medicine, theology, law, and business. Several chapter authors praise the modern academy for its ardent pursuit of knowledge and truth and its ample defense of tested truth-claims. But other authors challenge the ethical impact of some forms and forums of academic research today.

With contributions by Stefan Alkier (Frankfurt), Rüdiger Bittner (Bielefeld), Celia Deane-Drummond (Oxford), Bernold Fiedler (Berlin), Andreas Glaeser (Chicago), Gary Hauk (Atlanta), Jörg Hüfner (Heidelberg), Michael Kirschfi nk (Heidelberg), Andreas Schüle (Leipzig), William Schweiker (Chicago), Michael Welker (Heidelberg), and John Witte, Jr. (Atlanta).

William Schweiker is Edward L. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor of Theological Ethics at the University of Chicago. His publications include Religious Ethics: Meaning and Method (2020), Dust That Breathes: Christian Faith and the New Humanism (2010), Religion and the Human Future (2008), Theological Ethics and Global Dynamics: In the Time of Many World (2004), among others. He has served as Mercator Professor at Universität Heidelberg and holds an honorary doctorate from the University of Uppsala. Schweiker was President of the Society of Christian Ethics (2016).

Michael Welker, (born in 1947) was a professor of theology at the German universities of Tübingen, Münster, and Heidelberg and frequently a guest professor in the Anglo-American world (McMaster, Princeton, Harvard, Emory, and Cambridge). He is an honorary professor at Seoul Theological University, senior professor at the University of Heidelberg, and director of its Research Center International and Interdisciplinary Theology (FIIT). He has organized many international and interdisciplinary research projects that related theology and science, theology and law, theology and economy.