Research Projects at TRF

The URPP “Digital Religion(s)” investigates how current dynamics of digitalization influence, shape and transform the religious practices of individuals and institutions. Core issues and major topics include religious identity formation and the development of collaborative online-offline networks, practices of media communication in grieving and spiritual care, as well as phenomena of religion-related digital education.

In the 16th century, numerous commentaries on the Pauline Epistles were composed. They strongly influenced the development of biblical interpretation and theology in different denominations. Modern research on Paul has increasingly distanced itself from this tradition since the 1980s, but relatively few commentaries by well-known reformers such as Luther or Melanchthon serve as the negative point of reference. The remaining writings from the early modern period are poorly indexed and little studied. In this project, for the first time, all commentaries on the Pauline Epistles published between 1520 and 1600 in the area of the Swiss Reformation are systematically recorded in a database.

International scholarship on the Hebrew Bible shares the unanimous consensus that its books, including the Book of Jeremiah, are literary products of the first millennium BCE. Nearly all else is in dispute, for there are no textual witnesses to the Hebrew Bible that stem from the biblical period itself, as the discovery of biblical manuscripts from the Dead Sea are all post-biblical. This project develops an integrated methodology for dating biblical texts, using the Book of Jeremiah as a case study; it integrates  a significant Digital Humanities (DH) component with regard to linguistic dating, and balances the results from “natural” and “artificial” intelligence.

The correspondence of Zurich reformer Heinrich Bullinger (1504–1575), successor to Huldrych Zwingli, is of extraordinary historical and theological significance in terms of quality and is also probably the most extensive of the 16th century in terms of quantity. The critical edition of this correspondence is affiliated with the Institute for Swiss Reformation Studies at the University of Zurich.