Verleiblichte Geschichte

Overview & Synopsis

To trace the loss of plausibility of the Christian faith in the West during the 21st century, a mere examination of historical shifts in ideas is insufficient. Rather, a deeper understanding of the complex figurational dynamics of the somatonarrative constitution of the human being and its role in the generation of world access is necessary. This work represents an attempt to systematize the contributions of Charles Taylor, Wilhelm Schapp, Paul Ricoeur, Pierre Bourdieu, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Thomas Fuchs, and others with regard to the aforementioned figurational dynamics, while more closely interlinking individual themes from these prior works. Dimensions such as corporeality, narratives, language, habitus, sociality, practices, imagination, liturgicality, and ascetic techniques are related hermeneutically and phenomenologically to one another, in order to both address the question of the underlying causes of the shifts in plausibility and to render the findings productive for the question of the possibility of Christian existence in the 21st century.