Reconciliation in the Liminal Space between the Secular and the Divine

In this paper, we analyze the term reconciliation as well as Versöhnung in political and religious communication. Against this background, we are interested in how far political as well as religious dimensions of the terms come together, which we describe as a process of conceptual blending. To illustrate our argument, we apply corpus analytic methods on a quantitative level as well as a qualitative analysis in order to highlight what we call a semi-transcendent use of reconciliation/Versöhnung. For this we analyze four different corpora: (i) sermons in German, (ii) sermons in English, (iii) political speeches in German and (iv) political speeches in English. The purpose of the sermons is to illustrate the use of reconciliation/Versöhnung in religious communication whereas we use the speeches to contrast their use to the context political communication. Our analysis shows that semi-transcendent uses of reconciliation indicate metaphysical understanding of social relationships in individual relationships on micro level as well as political and societal conflicts on macro level.