Meaning in Our Bodies: Sensory Experience as Constructive Theological Imagination

ISBN-13: 9780190280925 / Angielski / Twarda / 2017 / 328 str.

Heike Peckruhn

Opis

Movement, smell, vision, and other perceptual experiences are ways of thinking and orienting ourselves in the world and are increasingly recognized as important resources for theology. In Meaning in Our Bodies, Heike Peckruhn seeks to discover how embodied differences like gender, race, disability, and sexuality connect to perceptual experience and theological imagination. Peckruhn offers historical and cultural comparisons, showing how sensory experience can order normalcy, social status, and communal belonging. She argues that scholars who appeal to the importance of bodily experiences need to acquire a robust and nuanced understanding of how sensory perceptions and interactions are cultural and theological acts of making meaning. This is a critical volume for feminist theorists and theologians, critical race theorists, scholars of disability and embodiment, and liberation thinkers who take experiences seriously as sources for theologizing and religious analysis.

Recenzje

Given the danger of body theology slipping into a merely metaphorical use of body, or being used to theorize about body rather than within our bodies, Peckruhn's continued return to sensory experiences, scents, movements, and bodily orientations is most helpful. This is perhaps the dimension of her book that is most inspiring as an example for how we do theology as embodied beings, making theological sense in our sensory experiences.

O autorze

Heike Peckruhn is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Daemen College in Amherst, New York.