INTERIORIDADE E RELIGIÃO VIVIDA: fundamentos fenomenológico-ontológicos da experiência religiosa a partir de Edith Stein

Abstract

This article investigates the relationship between interiority and lived religion in the thought of Edith Stein, with the aim of proposing a phenomenological-ontological foundation for religious experience within the field of Religious Studies. It begins from the problem that a significant part of lived religion studies privileges the description of everyday practices, personal narratives, and concrete experiences, without sufficiently deepening their anthropological and ontological foundations. The research adopts a theoretical-bibliographic approach, with a phenomenological and hermeneutical character, articulating Edith Stein’s philosophical anthropology with the contemporary perspective of lived religion, especially in dialogue with Nancy T. Ammerman. The argumentative path first explains the Steinian notion of interiority as the spiritual core of the person; then analyzes lived religion as an interpretive category for everyday religious practices; and finally proposes an approximation between these perspectives. It concludes that interiority can be understood as a condition of possibility for lived religious experience, since it allows practices, symbols, and narratives to be interpreted not only as sociocultural phenomena, but also as expressions of the person’s constitutive openness to meaning, value, and transcendence.