Is the Word of God in ELF? – New-Evangelization in Italian immigration contexts

This paper investigates how the ‘New Evangelization’ (NE) process in the Catholic Church is enacted through ELF by Italian clergy offering spiritual practical assistance to immigrants. A case study will show how the NE discourse requires from immigrants the activation a ‘suspension of disbelief ’, epistemically inducing them to believe that the clergy’s possible-world ‘metaphysical’ representations can be true, ‘experiential pliability’, deontically compelling immigrants to adapt their actual-world experience to such counterfactual constructions.