In this remarkable and incisive work, Sharon Betcher analyzes our world and God's embodied presence in the light of her own disability and the insight it affords. She claims disablement as a site of powerful social and religious critique and reflection. With searing honesty, she reveals how our culture, only recently tolerant and supportive of disabled people, still fears them. The presence of disabled persons stands as a rebuke to our images of body and health, to the distorted values of our consumerist culture, and the globalized economy that embodies those values in unjust structures. Yet,...

Drawing on philosophical reflection, spiritual and religious values, and somatic practice, Spirit and the Obligation of Social Flesh offers guidance for moving amidst the affective dynamics that animate the streets of the global cities now amassing around our planet. Here theology turns decidedly secular. In urban medieval Europe, seculars were uncloistered persons who carried their spiritual passion and sense of an obligated life into daily circumambulations of the city. Seculars lived in the city, on behalf of the city, but--contrary to the new profit economy of the time--with a different...

Drawing on philosophical reflection, spiritual and religious values, and somatic practice, Spirit and the Obligation of Social Flesh offers guidance for moving amidst the affective dynamics that animate the streets of the global cities now amassing around our planet.

Here theology turns decidedly secular. In urban medieval Europe, seculars were uncloistered persons who carried their spiritual passion and sense of an obligated life into daily circumambulations of the city. Seculars lived in the city, on behalf of the city, but contrary to the new profit economy of the time with a different...