Accessibility
A publicly funded university site, WCAG 2.1 AA. Visible focus, a real document structure, full keyboard operation. Every recording comes with a transcript or a summary. No content may be reachable by ear alone or by mouse alone.
The idea
Working on the boundary
“The boundary is the truly fertile place of knowledge.” In Paul Tillich the sentence is not consolation but a working instruction. It describes a place where two sides meet — religion and culture, faith and doubt, theology and politics — and where, for exactly that reason, something can be learned. This site takes that seriously: it provides material to work that boundary with, not a lecture about a theologian.
That is why listening comes before reading. There are original recordings — Tillich's voice, his pauses, his accent, his struggle for a sentence. Anyone who has heard these recordings reads the texts differently. The recordings are divided into chapters so that a seminar can open them at a particular passage, the way one opens a book. Every recording carries its provenance, its runtime and its rights situation visibly with it.
The difficult subjects are not left out. Tillich's position on the Jewish question, his emigration, his relation to power and racism, the fractures in his biography — these belong inside the modules, not in a footnote. A learning platform that shows only what is comfortable misses its subject. The tasks that go with them are prompts for thinking along, not an examination: no right answer, no assessment, no score.
And every module states who made it. Several modules grew out of students' final theses. Authorship belongs in plain sight — not as a courtesy but as a matter of scholarly honesty. Anyone working on with this material should know where it comes from, when it was last revised, and on what terms it may be reused.
Frugality
No account, no sign-in, no comments, no tracking cookies, no external fonts. Anyone who wants to keep their progress creates a code and writes it down — what is then stored is nothing but tick marks. Without a code nothing leaves the browser.
Two languages, equal in rank
English is not a second-class translation. The project works within an international network, so each language has its own addresses and the switch leads to the same page. Where a version is missing, that is said plainly rather than quietly falling back to the other language.
An offer for independent study
The modules are cut so that one of them carries a seminar session — with a statement of how long it takes before you begin. But they also work on their own at the kitchen table. What is here is an offer, not a course with attendance.