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Description

Sensing Sacred is an edited volume that explores the critical intersection of “religion” and “body” through the religious lens of practical theology, with an emphasis on sensation as the embodied means in which human beings know themselves, others, and the divine in the world. The manuscript argues that all human interaction and practice, including religious praxis, engages “body” through at least one of the human senses (touch, smell, hearing, taste, sight, kinestics/proprioception). Unfortunately, body—and, more specifically and ironically, sensation—is eclipsed in contemporary academic scholarship that is inherently bent toward the realm of theory and ideas. This is unfortunate because it neglects bodies, physical or communal, as the repository and generator of culturally conditioned ideas and theory. It is ironic because all knowledge transmission minimally requires several senses including sight, touch, and hearing. Sensing Sacred is organized into two parts. The first section devotes a chapter to each human sense as an avenue of accessing religious experience; while the second section explores religious practices as they specifically focus on one or more senses. The overarching aim of the volume is to explicitly highlight each sense and utilize the theoretical lenses of practical theology to bring to vivid life the connections between essential sensation and religious thinking and practice.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Embodied Knowing, Embodied Theology: What Happened to the Body? Bonnie Miller-McLemore

I. Exploring the Senses
1. Smelling Remembrance, Martha Jacobi
2. Embodying Christ, Touching Others, Shirley Guider
3. Savoring Taste as Religious Praxis: Where Individual and Social Intimacy Converge, Stephanie Arel
4. Embodied, Akroatic Hearing and Presence as Spiritual Practice, Jennifer Baldwin
5. Devotional Looking and the Possibilities of Free Associative Sight, Sonia Waters
6. Knowing Through Moving: African Embodied Epistemologies, Emmanuel Y. Lartey

II. Sensing Religious Practices
7. Use of a Hot Tub as Spiritual Practice: Three Decades of Daily Baptism by Immersion, John Carr
8. Word Made Flesh: Using Visual Textuality of Sign Languages to Construct Religious Meaning and Identity, Jason Hays
9. A Laying on of Hands: Black Feminist Intimations of the Divine and Healing Touch in Religious Practice, Christina Davis
10. Have We Lost Our Taste? Caring for Black Bodies Through Food, Kenya T

Product details

Published Mar 23 2018
Format Paperback
Edition 1st
Extent 206
ISBN 9781498531252
Imprint Lexington Books
Dimensions 9 x 6 inches
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Jennifer Baldwin

Contributor

Stephanie Arel

Contributor

John Carr

Contributor

Shirley Guider

Contributor

Jason Hays

Contributor

Martha Jacobi

Contributor

Kenya Tuttle

Contributor

Sonia Waters

ONLINE RESOURCES

Bloomsbury Collections

This book is available on Bloomsbury Collections where your library has access.

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