Talking loosely about the meaning of life

Isn't there too much chatter on television?? Night after night, we are assailed by talk shows and talk shows with self-appointed experts, often eager to provide information, who have meanwhile conquered their regular places in the armchairs of a TV society that is always chatting. Or we must endure profiless confession loops of third-class celebrities to banal rushes. It's striking that today it seems really easy to talk about the most intimate sex practices, but when religion comes into play and people talk about God, they often remain coyly silent, cough, or oddball exotics appear who have been dug out of the backwoods parlors of the Catholic Church and talk as if they were at a poorly attended medieval market.

Talking about the meaning of life

And now, so now comes 'Sellmann's Good Evening', so another talk show. Do we need the? "Yes," says Professor Matthias Sellmann. "Because we humans all need a sense experience, a sense experience and there I am simply interested in what the other has found". The new talk format reaches high on the shelf. The surface wants to leave it and invite to test drills in the sky. Because Sellmann is a curious person. The pastoral theologian is interested in what gives people meaning in life, in a world in which today one is no longer automatically, through family imprinting or moral prere, Catholic or Protestant. "Many people ask themselves, is there something there? Many people suspect that they have to relate to questions about the world and their own self in the world," explains Sellmann. "Many people are on the move ideologically. And some of them, Christians or even Muslims have an explicit idea of God and also an experience behind it". The exchange about this is exciting to learn what someone experiences who has a particular experience of God and someone who is searching, Sellmann explains.

From morticians to comedians – exciting guests on pilot show

In his new talk show, the theologian wants to talk easily and casually with people who ask the question of meaning. "To the good evening belongs thereby also a good ambience. You're with nice people – in a nice location," says Sellman, who has invited his guests to the historic old pawnshop in Cologne's Sudstadt district. "In addition then also that one feels world-descriptive well, that one thinks also times about the whole, that one gets information about it, that also the whole, in which one moves, is good".

In the pilot program 'Sellmann's Good Evening,' which was broadcast on 15. In the talk, which will be recorded on October 1, the mortician Clemens Fritz from Bochum, who has gathered extraordinary experience in crisis areas in Turkey, or Barbel Ackerschott from the Notel emergency shelter in Cologne, who, as the moderator says, speaks with a big heart for outcasts and drug addicts, with a lot of respect for other people and also with a great clarity about how she endures it in this work and why she even enjoys doing it very much.

Talking about God normally

The conversations are framed by music, from jazz to Bach or by the appearance of the well-known comedian Dave Davies, and then a perfumer also comes on the show, with whom Professor Sellmann is pursuing the unique project of making spiritual experiences smellable. "Because when you ask about the meaning of life, the senses play a significant role," Sellmann is convinced.

Sellmann's Good Evening is something new, a late-night talk featuring people who have experienced surprising things and who share special stories around the meaning of life and the question of God. "We certainly don't come here with a striking experience of God, but rather talk about what sustains people in a life that is lived riskily and passionately. The question of God and the question of what has meaning in my life and what meaning I place my bet on is actually a completely normal question that we should also be able to talk about with each other at the barbecue or at the cheese counter," says Sellmann, a professor of theology.