Digital Logos Edition
What is phenomenology? That is precisely the question this book seeks to answer. In an age of information overload, complex topics must be simplified to make them accessible to a wider audience. Phenomenology: A Basic Introduction in the Light of Jesus Christ not only presents the basic building blocks of phenomenology, it also gives body to voice by putting abstract ideas in contact with the Word made flesh, Jesus of Nazareth. In five manageable chapters, Donald Wallenfang introduces major themes such as the natural attitude, givenness, interpretation, paradox, and ethics. Each subject is considered in how it applies to daily life and relates to the gospel of Jesus Christ. Several biblical scenes are tapped to harvest their sweet nectars of meaning through phenomenology. At its limit, philosophy gives way to the revelatory rationality of theology as expressed by Jesus the phenomenologist.
Donald Wallenfang’s book presents key insights from Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology—givenness, saturated phenomena, the possibility of impossibility, paradox—and, with welcome clarity and many striking and accessible examples, shows us how to use them in the investigation of our human experience. At the same time, in a surprising and yet deeply sensible manner, Wallenfang explores how the practice of this phenomenological method of thinking can open us to the ‘impossible possibility’ that everyday life experience always and everywhere would become a theater for encounter with Jesus Christ. This is a bold and eloquent witness to nothing less than the complementarity of theology and philosophy in human experience.”
—Stephen E. Lewis, Franciscan University of Steubenville