Hermeneutical Narratives in Christian Religious Experience

International Perspectives

Malgorzata Haladewicz-Grzelak, Malgorzata Widel-Ignaszczak

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2025
• eBook ISBN: 9781350518476
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Historical & Comparative Linguistics
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book explores the intersection of culture, language, and religious experience, and approaches hermeneutics as a meta-perspective to address Christian religious communication.
It draws on the work of scholars from diverse geographical areas and academic fields, with a particular emphasis on Orthodox and Catholic Christianity and Slavic scholarship.

The volume explores Christian experiential identities through hermeneutics and phenomenology, in the context of diversity across denominations through theolinguistic and sociopragmatic perspectives. It offers the reader an exploration of specific cultural textscapes, considering the space of devotional and religious narrations in a variety of discourses. The chapters consider how the Gospel is conditioned and developed by specific strands of Christianity, the values that emerge through cultural contact and contact of specific denominations, how religion interacts with wider societal issues, and processes of sacralization and desacralization of culture, space and expression.

Offering critical insights into hermeneutics in the tradition of Schleiermacher, Gadamer and Ricoeur, it presents a variety of case studies and topics, including Andalusian saeta, Biblical studies, Icelandic hagiographies, issues of adaptation and exoticisation of the language of religious minorities, Old Church Slavonic scriptures, the Shrine of Fatima in Portugal, and sign language.
Through its exploration of religious narratives and interactions, the book not only broadens our understanding of Christian experience but also fosters dialogue across disciplines and cultures.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Tables
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I: Psycho-textual synergies
• Chapter 1: On the synergy of pictorial and verbal narrativity: The hermeneutical importance of verbal pre-texts to Christian visual art
• Chapter 2: Ecological hermeneutics in the interpretation of biblical texts: A Lutheran perspective
• Chapter 3: Phenomenological approaches to spiritual unification of Edith Stein and Pavel Florensky
• Part II: Cultures in contact
• Chapter 4: The hermeneutics of continuity and the Anglican patrimony in the Roman Catholic Church : A linguistic perspective
• Chapter 5: Religious experience in translation: An interpretation of the ‘own–foreign’ dichotomy in the light of the analysis of translations of Catholic texts into Russian
• Part III: Transference of tradition and meaningful connectiveness
• Chapter 6: Cultural communication in Cyrillic texts of homilies and its interpretations: The example of the eighteenth-century confessional tradition of Mukachevo diocese
• Chapter 7: Hermeneutics of (in)comprehension of religious texts in Old Believer communities (on the example of Old Believers living in Poland)
• Chapter 8: Icelandic Christian hagiography as cultural syncretism in the example of the Þorláks saga
• Part IV: The societal life-space in communality and in territory
• Chapter 9: Hermeneutical dynamics of the concept of ‘misericordia’ in the theme of La Lanzada (the spear thrust) in Andalusia saeta
• Chapter 10: Linguistic accessibility of religious experience for signing d/Deaf people in Poland
• Chapter 11: Pilgrimage as an embodied and emplaced religious experience in the case study of the Fátima Sanctuary (Portugal)
• Index