Prof. Dr. Rainer Anselm, born in 1965, studied protestant theology at Munich, Heidelberg and Zurich. On completing his doctorate in 1993 on the influences of protestant ethics on the reform of the German criminal law, he did the practical training of ministry and the second theological Exams and was ordained as a minister of the Lutheran Church of Bavaria in 1996. His postdoctoral lecture qualification followed in 1998 with a paper on the connection of ecclesiology and the theory of society. From 2000 to 2001 he was Professor of Theological Ethics in Jena and since 2001 he has held the Chair of Ethics at the Faculty of Theology of the University in Göttingen. He has been head of the interdisciplinary pilot-project “Together at the end of Life. Tumor patients as partners in the medical process of medical decision making”. From 2005 to 2008 he was Guest Professor at the Centre for Religion, Economy and Politics at the University of Zurich.