From Idol to Icon: Learning to See Through the Body

In the Theology of the Body, there are the three words of Jesus, the three original experiences, the three types of shame, the threefold concupiscence, and the three masters of suspicion. In this essay, I want to discuss yet another triptych -a triptych of questions -that is at the very heart of the Theology of the Body. These are the three questions of our age that form the back drop of that great work.

2013

Within a scientistic view of the world, rituals and sacraments are suspect. They are often invoked as proof of the incompatibility of religion and modernity. Mark Wynn employs important theoretical and phenomenological arguments against this widespread view. These arguments allow for a non-reductionist understanding of everyday and religious experience. In my reply I reconstruct these considerations in the context of a symbol theory that incorporates insights of philosophical anthropology and the contemporary theory of emotion. In this light, metaphorical language about rituals and sacraments as embodiments of God or religion can be approached with interpretative strategies that can take criticisms into account.

Studia Theologica: Nordic Journal of Theology, 62:1 (2008) pp. 25-43

In this article I discuss the question of how to speak of the body in theology after Friedrich Nietzsche's critique of Christianity as nihilistic. A purely theoretical and a-historic approach, such as could be found in much doctrinal theology as well as philosophy after Descartes, runs the risk of objectifying the body through its representations of it. The phenomenological approach to embodiment would instead help theology to avoid treating the body as a thing and instead as a communicative and expressive medium for relationships with divinity as well as other human beings. A critical theological somatology after Nietzsche would have to speak of the body through genealogical accounts of the traces of the body in biblical and theological texts as well as in religious practices such as prayer, liturgy and hymns with the aim of correlating this theological tradition with the articulations and configurations of embodiment today.

Unravelling Religion 4: Bodies and Objects May 12-13 2017 Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario Donald Gordon Conference Centre

Philosophy Compass, 2014

The relationship of minds, bodies, and persons has been a central topic of debate in Western philosophy and theology. This article reviews the ongoing debates about the relationship and nature of bodies, minds, and persons among contemporary Christian analytic philosophers and theologians. The first two parts present some general theological constraints for philosophical theories of persons and describe the basic concepts used (substance, property, supervenience, and physicalism). The views themselves fall into three broad categories. Dualists think that persons are either identical with or partly constituted by non-physical souls. On this view, there are immaterial substances and properties. Hylomorphists maintain that persons are composites of bodies and the souls that inform them. Finally, physicalists claim that there are no immaterial parts to persons. Instead, persons are composed of bodies and brains; the mental properties they have supervene on physical properties.

Religion is the marriage of mind and body. Both the mind and the body can have contrasting purposes. The mind can be used to explore virtue or engage vice. The body can be an instrument of faith that reflects God's love, or as a flawed participant in sin. I would also agree that philosophy is the marriage of the mind and body. My aim of this paper is to discuss the role of the body in the construction of religious practice, by first separating the differences between the religious body and the philosophical body. The difference in the teachings is that philosophy shapes the mind, giving it rules of virtuous ideas to guide the body, whereas religion gives rules for the body to practice to live virtuously in mind. Because of the diverse ideologies under the umbrellas of religion and philosophy, I will be limiting philosophies to Hellenistic culture and religion to those with that share in the father Abraham. These philosophies typically separate the body and soul into parts whereas in the religions of Abraham, the body, soul and spirit are regarded as one. I argue the body plays a crucial role in the construction of religious practice because the body acts as a microcosm in the macrocosm of society insofar as the body shapes religious practices; these religious practices establish cultural patterns.

Taking Manuel Vásquez's book as its point of departure, this essay explores what a truly materialist history of materiality for the study of religion might look like, in contradistinction to idealist histories of materiality. It then mounts a defense of Clifford Geertz as a pioneering scholar of material and embodied religion, against the positions taken by Vásquez and, earlier, by Talal Asad, applying a critique that has by now become overly entrenched and unquestionable.

Review & Expositor

Physical Education and Sport Through the Centuries, 2018

In his critique of the excessive influences of the personalistic philosophy on the theological construct that some of the most significant orthodox authors of the present are guided by, Jean‐Claude Larchet widely explains why the relation of the christian toward the body in the spiritual education of the more recent generations of the orthodox christians is vastly neglected. On another place he exposes a voluminous summary of the orthodox church tradition on the christian faith as a method of healing the passions, picturing the role of the traditional christian terms ascetism, athletics and agon (struggle) in the orthodox theology and advocating for the neccessity of their reafirmation in the christian upbringing of the modern people. The physical culture of the orthodox christians should be determined in the shape of explication of the christian endeavour as bodily discipline, considering the neccessary role of the body in bringing up the virtues, and also the importance of healing...

Commun(icat)ing Bodies, 2014