Tracing lost tangibility Understanding Christianity within (post) secular plurality. An attempt at translating Christianity based on Michel de Certeau

Abstract

This essay proposes that the philosophy and approach of the French Jesuit Michel de Certeau (1925–1986) offers a perspective to take up Jürgen Habermas’ call to translate religious meaning without getting lost in the dichotomy of the religious and the secular. Certeau understands Christianity as a movement that arose from the absence of a body, and whose academic and institutional rootedness remains similarly intangible. It is this understanding that provides potential answers to the question how Christianity can be genuinely lived and remain genuinely relevant in a (post) secular, plural world.