WGTh Network “Praxeo Theology: Program – Problems – Perspectives” (PraxeoTheologie)

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Description

Theories of practice are based on a central premise. Constructively speaking, this premise states that a practice constitutes the smallest unit of meaningful description (methodological) and the smallest unit of meaning and understanding (hermeneutic) (cf. Schatzki 2001, 10; Reckwitz 2003, 290). Critically speaking, this means that the other alternatives – such as structures, systems, communication, actions, or (individual or network-like) subjects – need to be corrected in their focus. Practice theories have three major advantages over structuralist, systems theory, action-oriented, and subjectivist approaches: a practice can be described via internal configurations (such as routine or materialized activities, socially shared rules, norms, habits) (Möllers 2015, chap. 3); it integrates previously disparate approaches that have also been partially, albeit individually, received in theology (including materiality and dispositives, theories of affect & emotions, forms of embodiment); Finally, the focus on practice allows for a redefinition of actions and what emerges from them (cf. implicit knowledge, repetition and difference, theories of the event, performance studies). What happens theologically when a network of religious practices is defined as the subject of the discipline? This can now be further specified: What happens when practices are understood as routinized or repetitive, materialized-affective, rule-governed, and performatively productive (con)figurations? The dogmatic explosiveness of this initially methodological proposal may be clear: the relationship between repetitive practices, which can vary in time and space, and performative practices, and what they are about—possibly a performative event in itself—would have to be understood in a new way. Translated with DeepL.com (free version) Translated with DeepL.com (free version)