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It's my great pleasure to introduce to you my friend Philipp Barnes.

I'm also very happy that I was able to convince him to deliver his talk standing,

because it will be recorded, against his habit of sitting when he delivers things.

I'm kind of a relaxed type of person.

But you will also be relaxed. I hope so.

Philip Barnes trained to be a religious education teacher in Strandmillis College in Belfast,

and then proceeded to study theology and philosophy at Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland,

and the University of Hull and Trinity College in Dublin,

where he gained also his doctorate in philosophy.

He taught religious education in Belfast for 16 years, so he has quite a practice in that,

and was lecturer in religious education at the University of Ulster before he became reader

in religious and theological education at King's College in London.

He's also been visiting professor of religious studies at Union Theological College in Belfast,

and because of restructurings in King's College,

Professor Barnes has been emeritus since 2014, but he's still highly active in researching and publishing,

especially in publishing.

I envy him a little bit for the freedom and for the time he has now to publish one book after the other.

He's well known for having developed an alternative concept of religious education

to the long-dominant phenomenological approach in British multi-faith religious education.

When I got to know him at one of our first Islamic conferences,

I remember that he tended to call himself one of the rebels of religious education theorists in Britain.

So this is also mirrored in his recent authored books titled...

You wanted to make an advertisement for your book yourself, but shall I do it now?

Reinforce it for the camera.

Because I wanted to mention it.

So this is it, Education, Religion and Diversity from 2014.

There's another book, Religious Education, Educating for Diversity from 2015.

This year he has, together with James Arthur, edited a four-volume selection of important writings

by diverse authors in the thematic field of education and religion.

So that might also be important for you or interesting for you as a resource for seminars and teaching at university.

Alluding to the British concept of multi-faith religious education and its difference from the German concept

of theologically grounded confessional religious education,

I have invited Professor Barnes to reflect in his paper on the question of public theologies or religious studies,

deliberations on the basis of multi-faith religious education.

De Philip, I'm looking forward to your certainly stimulating talk.

Thank you very much, Manfred, for that very warm welcome.

What Manfred omitted to say is that in the collection of essays that I edited,

Manfred, of course, he talked about influential religious educators being included in that, of which he is one, by the way.

I'm going to read two quotations to begin with.

When I read them, you can think who could have said this.

Here we go.

I find it impossible to hold that the consequences of modern studies and of views relating to my own

would be to change theology faculties into faculties for the study of the history of religions.

Faculties of this kind would be utterly meaningless.

What theology is concerned with is not the history of religion in general,

but normative knowledge acquired through the scientific knowledge of religion.

Only this kind of meaning for theology.

This one thing is not one of many tumor-like possibilities that hover far off in the distance.

It is within reach.