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This essay addresses Pope Benedict XVI’s apostolic exhortation Verbum Domini, which explained authoritatively the three central principles of Catholic scriptural interpretation found in the Vatican II constitution Dei Verbum. In Verbum Domini, much of Benedict’s prior work as a private theologian gained a magisterial voice. Hence, this essay will engage both with Verbum Domini and Benedict’s previous writings. For Benedict, theology is more than information. When practiced as a “spiritual science,” theology is a real contact with the living Word. The authors of scripture are, accordingly, “normative theologians.” The real contact with the living Word contained in scripture is most profoundly mediated by the Church’s liturgy. The biblical Word’s liturgical setting is the source of its theological normativity. Thus, for Benedict, the performativity of the Word implies a unity between Scripture and liturgy, and the resultant normativity of the Word implies a unity between Scripture and theology. Without these unities, and the life of continuous conversion that flows from their recognition, there can be no theology in the true sense of the word. If these unities are recognized, however, the task of the theologian becomes letting God himself “speak”—to be the servant or handmaiden of revelation.

Man is “the race with style”, according to Gottfried Benn’s essay Dorische Welt (1934), a text providing a transition between his political commitment to National Socialism and his ‘inner emigration’. Thus, on the one hand, it contains some of Benn’s most problematic statements—the celebration of Machiavellian political decisionism, the causal derivation of Western art from soldierly slave states or the celebration of eugenics—while, on the other hand, it reaffirms a bourgeois aesthetic of autonomy. The common denominator for this is a contradictory naturalization of the arts: they are an emanation of the social body and at the same time a law unto themselves, they are nature and turn into anti-nature, that is into “style”—an argument familiar from idealist aesthetics, but also from the considerations of German philosophical anthropology. The article discusses this variant of the naturalization of the arts using the example of a French-German cultural transfer; since one of the main sources for Benn’s text montage is Hippolyte Taine’s Philosophie de l’art en Grèce (1869).

Der Beitrag stellt ein Trainingsprogramm für Lehramtsstudierende der Grundschule vor, das das Ziel verfolgt, die Teilnehmenden zu einer kognitiv aktivierenden Gesprächsführung im Mathematikunterricht zu befähigen. Eine ebensolche Gesprächsführung wird im Unterricht oft als herausfordernd erlebt, weshalb ein solches Training als wichtiger Ausbildungsinhalt im Lehramtsstudium angesehen wird. Neben Einblicken in die Trainingskonzeption werden erste Ergebnisse aus der Erprobung im Versuch-Kontrollgruppen-Design präsentiert. Zur Auswertung der von den Teilnehmenden im Rahmen einer praktischen Erprobung geplanten Gesprächssequenzen wurde ein hoch inferentes Rating angewendet, mit dem die Qualität der konzipierten Gespräche zu einer gegebenen Mathematikaufgabe beurteilt wurde. Es zeichnet sich ein moderater Trainingseffekt auf der Konzeptebene bei der Versuchsgruppe ab.

The future vision described in the 1924 novel Berge Meere und Giganten begins with the global spread of a social formation that strives to export its technology and security system to even the most remote regions. There is some opposition, however: the novel presents a multitude of actors who resist planetary homogenization and integration into networks (e.g., of global transport). In this context, I explore the construction of alterity or radical otherness. The most spectacular among these actors is the desert, which becomes a pole of resistance against Western norms. The paper traces the inter- and pre-texts that result in the construction of an ‘other space’, i.e. contemporary geopolitical and geobiographical literature.

The Bündnis Junger Ärztinnen und Ärzte (BJÄ, Alliance of Young Physicians in Germany) has presented a position paper (PP) on Postgraduate Medical Education (PGME) against the background of an unfolding hospital reform in Germany, and they describe existing deficits of PGME in Germany. Based on this, demands were made of legislators, employers and medical associations which could result in a sweeping reformation of PGME. Hospital reforms can only be accomplished with well trained and motivated physicians. In this respect the BJÄ regards the reform of hospitals and the health-care system as a chance for a reform of PGME, which is long overdue. Legislative competence for PGME lies with the States of the Federal Republic of Germany and this warrants an adjustment of state medical association laws to accommodate the demands of the BJÄ. Generally PGME must be taken into consideration in all health-care legislation, in analogy to the meanwhile globally adopted principle of “Health in all Politics (HiAP)”. The BJÄ has made every endeavour to produce this PP. The responsible stakeholders and actors in the health-care system would be well-advised to take the position paper seriously with a dwindling physician work force in hospitals and serious quality deficits in PGME. Hence, the BJÄ must be comprehensively supported. They need congenial partners to define the scientific foundation of all their demands, to test their application under real life conditions in hospital and outpatient care, to pursue research on the impact on patient care and on the intended transformation of the health-care system. This might best be accomplished by partnering with a scientific as has been the case in many countries for decades.

Objective: Medical students’ health and resilience have increasingly been the subject of current research in recent years. A variety of interventions are recommended to strengthen resilience or its known or suspected influencing factors, although the literature shows that the evidence on the effectiveness of the interventions is inconsistent. The present study investigated whether gratitude is a direct protective factor for resilience in medical students or whether resilience factors (optimism, self-efficacy, social support) and stress mediate the effects of gratitude on resilience.Methods: 90 medical students at Witten/Herdecke University took part in the study that determined their gratitude, resilience, optimism, self-efficacy, social support and stress levels using validated questionnaires (GQ-6, RS-25, LOT-R, SWE, F-SozU, PSS). Correlations were analyzed using Pearson correlation coefficients. In addition, a multivariate regression analysis and a path analysis were calculated to determine the direct and indirect effects of gratitude on resilience.Results: Multivariate regression analysis showed that only optimism, social support and stress were significantly associated with resilience (B=0.48, 95% CI: 0.31, 0.66; B=0.23, 95% CI: 0.01, 0.44 and B=-0.02, 95% CI: -0.03, -0.001, respectively). The direct effect of gratitude on resilience was minimal and not significant in the path analysis. However, there was an indirect effect of gratitude on resilience (B=0.321; p