Books in the Studies in Body and Religion series

Dancing Bodies of Devotion: Fluid Gestures in Bharata Natyam examines how Bharata Natyam, a traditionally Hindu storytelling dance form, moves across religious boundaries through both incorporating choreography on Buddhist, Christian, Muslim, and Jain themes and the pluralistic identities of participants. Dancers traverse religious boundaries by reformulating an aesthetic foundation based on performative rather than solely textual understandings of rasa, conventionally defined as a formula for how to physically craft emotion on stage. Through the ethnographic case studies of this volume, dancers of Bharata Natyam innovatively demonstrate how the rasa of devotion (bhakti rasa), surprisingly absent from classic dance-related texts, serves as the pivotal framework for expanding on their own interreligious thematic and interpretive possibilities. In contemporary Bharata Natyam, bhakti rasa is not just about enhancing religious experience; instead, these dancers choreographically adapt various religious identities and ideas in order to emphasize pluralistic cultural and ethical dimensions in their work. Through the dancing body, multiple religious and secular interpretations fluidly co-exist.

Much as the modern Western world is concerned with diets, health, and anti-aging remedies, many early medieval Chinese Daoists also actively sought to improve their health and increase their longevity through specialized ascetic dietary practices. Focusing on a fifth-century manual of herbal-based, immortality-oriented recipesthe Lingbao Wufuxu (The Preface to the Five Lingbao Talismans of Numinous Treasure)Shawn Arthur investigates the diets, their ingredients, and their expected range of natural and supernatural benefits. Analyzing the ways that early Daoists systematically synthesized religion, Chinese medicine, and cosmological correlative logic, this study offers new understandings of important Daoist ideas regarding the body's composition and mutability, health and disease, grain avoidance (bigu) diets, the parasitic Three Worms, interacting with the spirit realm, and immortality. This work also employs a range of cross-disciplinary scientific and medical research to analyze the healing properties of Daoist self-cultivation diets and to consider some natural explanations for better understanding Daoist asceticism and its underlying world view.

In this provocative study of dancing, Sam Gill examines the interpretive styles of a variety of cultural dance traditions in discourse with the philosophic traditions of Schiller, Merleau-Ponty, Barbaras, Derrida, Leroi-Gourhan, and Baudrillard. As a scholar of religion, Gill provides special consideration to the importance of this emerging appreciation of dancing as a perspective inclusive of body and experience. Each chapter delves into the many factions of dancing: moving, gesturing, self-othering, playing, seducing, and masking. Gill also draws on the analysis of contemporary dance films and musicals, his experience as a dancer and dance teacher, his extensive research on dance traditions, and his interest in neurobiology and phenomenology to develop the core of this rich exploration of ';dancing,' the structurality of all dances.

Given that women and girls carry the heaviest burdens of the African HIV pandemic, their lived experiences should be the starting point for any pedagogy of prevention. In light of this claim, Risky Marriage: HIV and Intimate Relationships in Tanzania uses qualitative fieldwork with HIV positive women living in Mwanza, Tanzania to ask why marriage is an HIV risk factor. By beginning with women's experience as a hermeneutical lens, this book seeks to establish a creative space where African women can imagine new alternatives to HIV prevention that would promote human flourishing and abundant life in African communities. The aim of this book is to listen faithfully to the lived experiences of HIV positive women and ask how their experiences can help us re-imagine Christian conceptions of marriage, sexual ethics, and health in an HIV positive world. By drawing on the unwritten texts of women's lives, this study proposes alternative pedagogies for faith-based prevention methods and contributes to the wider interdisciplinary and theo-ethical discourse on HIV prevention and women's health. At the same time, it makes local impact of equal importance as women in East African communities are invited to think creatively about ways to end the HIV pandemic.For more information and comments from the author, watch a trailer for the book here: http://vimeo.com/semafilms/riskymarriage

Sensing Sacred is an edited volume that explores the human senses (smell, touch, taste, hearing, smell, and proprioception) through the lenses of practical theology and pastoral care. It focuses on each of the senses independently and through specific religious practices.

This book examines the broad significance of the current trends in technology (AI/robots) against the long history of the human imagination of making sentient beings. It seeks to enrich our understanding of the present as it is trending into the future against the richly relevant and surprisingly long past.

Differences-cultural, religious, racial, gender, age-are at the heart of the most disruptive and disturbing concerns from personal relationships to global politics. Creative Encounters argues for the higher goal of appreciating difference as being essential to creativity and innovation, even if often experienced as stressful and complex.

Medieval scholars and cultural historians have recently turned their attention to the question of ';smells' and what olfactory sensations reveal about society in general and holiness in particular. Sacred Scents in Early Christianity and Islam contributes to that conversation, explaining how early Christians and Muslims linked the ';sweet smell of sanctity' with ideals of the body and sexuality; created boundaries and sacred space; and imagined their emerging communal identity. Most importantly, scentitself transgressive and difficult to controlsignaled transition and transformation between categories of meaning.Christian and Islamic authors distinguished their own fragrant ethical and theological ideals against the stench of oppositional heresy and moral depravity. Orthodox Christians ridiculed their ';stinking' Arian neighbors, and Muslims denounced the ';reeking' corruption of Umayyad and Abbasid decadence. Through the mouths of saints and prophets, patriarchal authors labeled perfumed women as existential threats to vulnerable men and consigned them to enclosed, private space for their protection as well as society's. At the same time, theologians praised both men and women who purified and transformed their bodies into aromatic offerings to God. Both Christian and Muslim pilgrims venerated sainted men and women with perfumed offerings at tombstones; indeed, Christians and Muslims often worshipped together, honoring common heroes such as Abraham, Moses, and Jonah. Sacred Scents begins by surveying aroma's quotidian functions in Roman and pre-Islamic cultural milieus within homes, temples, poetry, kitchens, and medicines. Existing scholarship tends to frame ';scent' as something available only to the wealthy or elite; however, perfumes, spices, and incense wafted through the lives of most early Christians and Muslims. It ends by examining both traditions' views of Paradise, identified as the archetypal Garden and source of all perfumes and sweet smells. Both Christian and Islamic texts explain Adam and Eve's profound grief at losing access to these heavenly aromas and celebrate God's mercy in allowing earthly remembrances. Sacred scent thus prompts humanity's grief for what was lost and the yearning for paradisiacal transformation still to come.

Incarnation has always been an important concept within Christian theology. For centuries theologians have wrestled with how best to conceptualize the vexing problem of what it means that Jesus the Christ is fully God and fully human. In this book, Adam Pryor explores how the incarnation has intersected corresponding issues well beyond the familiar question of how any one person might have two natures. Beginning by identifying four critical themes that have historically shaped the development of this doctrine, Pryor goes on to offer a constructive account of the incarnation. His account seeks out the continued meaning of this doctrine given the increasing complexity that characterizes our understanding of human bodiesbodies that can no longer be understood as the locus of distinct subjects separated from the world of objects with the skin as an impenetrable boundary between the two. Making use of contemporary phenomenologies of the flesh and the erotic, Pryor develops an understanding of the incarnation that seeks to go beyond classical issues presented by two natures christologies. Incarnation, in guises as various as Jesus the Christ, cyborg bodies, and sacramental practices, becomes a way that God is diffused into the world, transforming how we are to be-with one another.

Quatremere's Moral Considerations (1815) highlights fine art as it was then being displayed in public art museums and questions whether public art museums can properly serve the fine arts or can only serve imperialism. Ruprecht provides an English translation of this work that is still relevant today.

This book explores the interface of bodies and religion by investigating the impacts human-induced global warming will have on the embodied and performed practices of religion in ecologies of place. By utilizing analytical insights from religion and nature theory, posthumanism, queer ecologies, ecological animisms, indigenous knowledges, material feminisms, and performance studies the book advocates for a need to update how religious studies theorizes bodies and religion. It does so by in the first half of the book advocating for religious studies as a field, and the academy as a whole, to take the ongoing and deleterious future impacts of climate change seriously--to re-member that those laboring as scholars in religious studies, and the communities they study, have always been bodies in material bio-ecological places--and to let this inform the questions religious studies scholars ask. The book argues that this will lead to very different forms of engaged, liberatory scholarship that demands a different type of scholarship and public advocacy for resilience in the face of climate change. The second half of the book offers case study examples of how scholars may better engage religious bodies within petrocultures, while attending to new, emerging materialist posthuman assemblages of religious bodies. This book will be of interest to those in religious studies, the environmental humanities, and those working at the interface of the body and the natural world.

Drawing from nature experience, dance, anthropology, and shamanism, Dr. Eline Kieft explores improvised movement as a pathway to insight, healing, transformation, and direct interaction with source. Dancing in the Muddy Temple takes the reader on a journey through multiple layers of embodied spirituality based in movement and embedded in the land. Addressing existential questions outside of mainstream religions, the book seeks possibilities for a spirituality that dances with the sacred life force within and all around us. Starting within the body, and always using movement as a way of knowing, Kieft expands on further concrete and subtle layers of connection. A sensorial immersion in the land develops into an expansion of consciousness and meeting intangible aspects of nature. After exploring the role of ceremony in contemporary times, the book concludes with an unexpected chapter on healing, drawing together insights for a dynamic approach to health and wholeness as innate part of an embodied spirituality. Moving seamlessly between her personal, professional, and academic background, Kieft creates an unusual scholarship in which bodily and autobiographical narrative are neatly interwoven with interdisciplinary literature. Its uniqueness lies in a radical integration of theory and practice, which brings an aliveness to the material that stirs an inquisitive desire to move, rooted in language that inspires confidence for personal inquiry into a rich and complex territory. This inspiring book offers an intricate road map to explore and strengthen the interwovenness of various layers of self, surroundings and the sacred, distilling tools for a practical, moving spirituality of the everyday.