The Visual Art of Käthe Kollwitz as Practical Theodicy and Its Relevance to Hope in Theoretical Theodicy
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Some theorists have characterized art that actively engages people in meaningfully religious ways as a form of “practical theology.” This paper analyzes how the visual art of German artist Käthe Kollwitz (1867–1945) functions as practical theology—with special attention to theodicy—that is, its role as religious response to the realities of suffering and evil. There is a call among some scholars and theologians to abandon all attempts to defend God's love and goodness in the face of destructive evil and suffering (theoretical theodicy), and rather to focus solely on how people ought to respond practically to such realities (practical theodicy). The paper illustrates Kollwitz's work as a powerful and pioneering form of practical theodicy, one that sensitively integrates ethical-feminist and socio-political concerns in stimulating compassion and consolation, supporting positive social change, and invoking theological hope. In proposing the creative integration of practical and theoretical theodicy, it also shows how such practical theodicy depends upon the hope in certain themes of theoretical theodicy.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".