BIOGRAPHY

Academics

Elisabeth is Professor of Ethics and serves as Ethicist at the Research Department, Church of Sweden. She has spent several years at Princeton University as visiting scholar. Since she returned to Sweden in 1995, she has lived in Lund and worked as Senior Ethicist and Associate Professor and lecturer in Ethics and Human Rights at Lund and Malmö Universities. She was Dean of the Pastoral Institute in Lund 2001 – 2005.

Singer and songwriter

During her entire life she has performed as a singer and songwriter, in New York as well as all over Scandinavia. Some of her music from the album The Wind is still blowing is available here under music.

Publications

Her new book deals with Luther and Sensualism (Sinnlighetens närvaro – Luther mellan Kroppskult och kropssförakt, Verbum 2015).

Her book (Farlig förenkling, Om Religion och Politik, Nya Doxa 2010) on religion and politics deals with the return of religion, neo-atheism and nationalist parties. She challenges dangerous simplifications to talk about groups as homogenous and religions in essentialist terms rather than as situated in historical and economic circumstances.

With Peter Gärdenfors, Professor of Cognitive Science Lund, and Matz Hammarström, Religious Philosophy, she has edited a book on different views on human beings 150 years after Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

A few years ago she published an anthology on contemporary Lutheran theology: Luther som utmaning: Om frihet och ansvar (Luther as a Challenge: On Freedom and Responsibility, 2009).

In her book Mänskliga Rättigheter för Guds skull (2006) (Human Rights for God’s sake) she is dealing with how pre-modern or early modern theories and metaphors can be related to late modern society in ways that support democracy, non-discrimination and Human Rights (rather than to hierarchical models of family), religious institutions and society. In this context she has compared Swedish and Danish nationalism and its relationship to Reformation and written on marriage and sexuality from a Lutheran perspective.

She has also written numerous articles on the relationship between Enlightenment and Christian faith, Modernity, Human Rights and Lutheran Christianity, on the challenges of Multiculturalism and on globalization.