Theology and the Kinesthetic Imagination: Jonathan Edwards and the Making of Modernity

ISBN-13: 9780199373062 / Angielski / Twarda / 2014 / 192 str.

Kathryn Reklis

Opis

Beauty, bodily knowledge, and desire have emerged in late modern Christian theology as candidates to reorient and reinvigorate reflection. In this

Reklis describes the theological meaning of the body's ecstasy as "kinesthetic imagination," a term which extends beyond the Great Awakening to trace the way bodily ecstasy continues to be coded as the expression of a primitive, hysterical, holistic, or natural self almost always in contrast to a modern, rational, fragmented, or artificial self. Edwards, she shows, is an excellent interlocutor for the exploration of kinesthetic imagination and theology, especially as it relates to contemporary questions about the role of beauty, body, and desire in theological knowledge. He wrote explicitly about the role of the body in theology, the centrality of affect in spiritual experience, and anchored all of this in a theological system grounded in beauty as his governing concept of divine reality. This book offers an innovative reading of one of the most widely known American theologians and offers this reading as provocation for debates within contemporary conversations.

Recenzje

This is a wonderfully written book with important new things to say about Edwards and the future of Christian theology. Edwards and the bodily effects of his sermons come alive within the context of the circum-Atlantic world of his times, with the promise of an enlivened, more kinetically nuanced, theology to come

O autorze

Kathryn Reklis Reklis is Assistant Professor of Modern Protestant Theology at Fordham University in New York City. She is also a Research Fellow for the New Media Project at the Christian Theological Seminary, and Co-Director of the Institute for Art, Religion and Social Justice, which she co-founded in 2009 with artist A.A. Bronson. She lives in Astoria, Queens with her husband and young son.