In conversation with … Manuel Stetter

Abstract

Manuel Stetter has held the Chair of Practical Theology at the University of Rostock since 2022, where he also serves as university preacher. Prior to this role, he studied and earned his doctorate at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at the University of Tübingen, completing his dissertation The Sermon as a Practice of Transformation. A Contribution to the Foundations of Homiletics (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht 2018) in 2016. In 2022, he completed his habilitation, also in Tübingen; its findings are published in the monograph The Constitution of the Dead. A Religious Ethnography of Funeral Practice (Evangelische Verlagsanstalt 2024). Alongside his academic work in research and teaching, Manuel Stetter also served as a vicar for two and a half years. The engagement with death shapes all areas of his work—and how exactly, and what role the question of the (un)speakability of death plays in this, is the subject of the following interview.

The conversation with Manuel Stetter was conducted by Katharina Fürholzer, Junior Professor of Interdisciplinary Studies (Koblenz).