Meaning in Our Bodies

Abstract

What do our everyday experiences and bodily movements have to do with our theological imagination? How should we draw the connection between lived experience and theology? Feminist theologians, as well as other scholars, appeal to the importance of bodily experiences and perceptions when developing claims regarding social and cultural values and argue that our actions are always meaningful. But where and how do these arguments gain traction beyond mere thinking about methods in religious studies or theological exploring of metaphors? Religious scholars and theologians need to acquire a robust grasp on how sensory perceptions and interactions are cultural and theological acts that are bodily meaning making. This book presents a method of tracing embodied experience in order to account for meaning in everyday movements and encounters by strengthening and refining the concept of “experience” through a set of analytical commitments built on Maurice Merlau-Ponty’s phenomenological concepts. The notion of bodily experience is extended to that which makes up our social and theological knowledges. Bodily perceptual experiences are ways of thinking and orienting in the world, therefore comprising theological imagination. This is demonstrated in historical and cultural comparisons where taste, touch, and emitted sounds may order normalcy, social status, or communal belonging. Constructive body theology as analytical tool is tested in feminist projects known for their explicit turn to experience and embodiment (Carter Heyward, Marcella Althaus-Reid). This book concludes with presentations of constructive possibilities that emerge when everyday bodily experience is utilized effectively as a source for religious and theological inquiries.