Religion and the Body

This book aims to highlight the distinctive and unfamiliar ways in which diverse religious traditions understand the ‘body’, and also, in doing this, to raise to greater consciousness some of the assumptions and problems of contemporary attitudes to it. It brings together essays by established experts in the history of religion, the social sciences, and philosophy. Part I is devoted to an analysis of current secularized discourses on the ‘body’, and to exposing both their anti-religious and their covertly religious content. Parts II and III provide essays on traditional ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ religious attitudes to the ‘body’. Each contributor focuses on some (especially characteristic) devotional practices or relevant texts; each carefully outlines the total context in which a distinctive religious attitude to ‘bodiliness’ occurs. The result is a rich source for comparative studies of the ‘body’, and of its relation to society and to the divine.

• The only book to explore the role of the body in different religious traditions • Includes chapters by leading sociologists of religion as well as theologians • Accessible within gender studies/cultural studies, as well as in religious studies

1. Introduction: religion and the body Sarah Coakley; Part I. Contemporary Western Perspectives: Secularism and the Body: 2. The body in Western society: social theory and its perspectives Bryan S. Turner; 3. Remarks on the anthropology of the body Talal Asad; 4. The soul\'s successor: philosophy and the ‘body’ Mary Midgley; Part II.The Western Religious Inheritance: Judaism and Christianity on the Body: 5. The body in Jewish worship: three rituals examined Louis Jacobs; 6. ‘My helper and my enemy’: the body in Greek Christianity Kallistos Ware; 7. The body in Western Catholic Christianity Andrew Louth; 8. The image of the body in the formative phases of the Protestant Reformation David Tripp; Part III. Beyond the West: Eastern Religious Traditions and the Body: 9. Zoroastrianism and the body Alan Williams; 10. Medical and mythical constructions of the body in Hindu texts Wendy Doniger; 11. The body in Theravada Buddhist monasticism Steven Collins; 12. Some Mahayana Buddhist perspectives on the body Paul Williams; 13. The Taoist body and cosmic prayer Michael Saso; 14. Perceptions of the body in Japanese religion Michael Pye; 15. ‘I take the dress off the body’: Eros in Sufi literature and life Annemarie Schimmel; 16. The body in Sikh tradition Eleanor Nesbitt.