You Will Know Them by Their Fruits: Theological Practice and Michel de Certeau

The oeuvre of Michel de Certeau has found rather limited reception among theologians due to the trans-disciplinary nature of his investigations. This research project seeks to reconstruct a theological project that animated de Certeau’s work in his other disciplines of philosophy, historiography, and cultural studies. In so doing, the project will raise critical questions on the relationship between theology and the other disciplines, questions that it will seek to answer through comparison of de Certeau’s theological approach with the impulses that led the first Christians to describe their faith as “true philosophy.” By putting these ancient approaches into dialogue with de Certeau, the project hopes to both recover lost threads of theological (and philosophical) praxis and point towards new ways of doing theology in our post-modern situation.