Heinrich Wilhelm Schäfer
Heinrich Wilhelm Schäfer was born in 1955. He currently holds the chairs of Protestant Theology and Sociology of Religion at the Faculty of History, Philosophy and Theology and the Faculty of Sociology, Bielefeld University. He is member and co-founder of the Center for Interdisciplinary Research on Religion and Society. Biography. In 1983, 1985 and 1986 he conducted field research on religious movements (with emphasis on Pentecostalism) in the Central American civil wars based on the sociology of Bourdieu. From 1989 to 2006 he was pastor of the Protestant Church of Westfalia. In 1991 he received the  title of "Dr. theol.". From 1992 to 1994 he served as Lecturer (Lehrbeauftragter) for Ecumenical Theology at the University of Bochum, Bochum. Between 1995 and 2003 he taught Systematic Theology and Social Sciences (emphasis on religion) at the Universidad Bíblica Latinoamericana, Costa Rica, as well as Religious and Cultural Studies at the Universidad Nacional, San José, Costa Rica. In this context he frequently taught and performed research in different Latin American countries, among others Brazil, Cuba, Mexico and Venezuela. Between 1998 and 2003 he participated in an international working group on religion and globalization of the World Council of Churches  at Chateau de Bossey, Geneva. In 2002 he was awarded the titles "Dr. phil. (rer. soc.)" (Humboldt University, Berlin) and the post-doctoral "Habil. theol." (Ruhr-Universität, Bochum). From 2003 to 2006 he worked as Lecturer (Lehrbeauftragter) for Religious Studies at Leibniz University Hannover, Germany. Since 2006 he is professor at Bielefeld University, Germany. Academia. Since the early 1980s, he engages issues of religion, social inequality, and violence from a social science perspective, initiated during his university years studying and obtaining his doctorate, and subsequently continued in his function as teacher and researcher. He gained an insight into the state  of civil war and criminal violence in the slums, primarily in Latin America. Since 2006, he conducts research also in Bosnia-Herzegovina. He also has been studying religious fundamentalism since the late 1970s (Iranian revolution). In a new research project on the religious field and political strategies of religious actors in Guatemala and Nicaragua, the religious transformations in periphery countries during the last 30 years will be studied comparatively. Much of Schäfer’s research on religious actors concentrates on the Pentecostal movement. In theoretical and methodological perspective Schäfer focuses on the sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. He has developed a method  for Habitus-Analysis which will be published 2012 in English. In Theology Schäfer concentrates on interdisciplinary hermeneutics and pneumatology.