It's relational

If, like a complex craft, a tradition of inquiry becomes a tradition only in the course of history and as the participants become aware of their participation in it as participation in a history of particular beliefs, skills, practices, and so on, then narrative is that which renders the history intelligible to its participants as a history of this or that particular kind.

The ability to locate one’s life as a particular mode-of-being-in-the-world, that is, depends upon the story that makes a life locatable in this specific way. By working through a juxtaposition of the narratives that fund the shapes of life called Christian and Stoic, we are thus thinking relationally with that which makes it possible to be Stoic or Christian in the first place.—One True Life: The Stoics and Early Christians as Rival Traditions, 199

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So this is the way forward. We'll see how it differs from the typical methodology—and if the results are worth it.
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