Meaning in Our Bodies: Sensory Experience as Constructive Theological Imagination

by Heike Peckruhn

Overview

Movement, smell, vision, and other perceptual experiences are ways of thinking and orienting ourselves in the world and are increasingly recognized as important resources for theology. In Meaning in Our Bodies, Heike Peckruhn seeks to discover how embodied differences like gender, race, disability, and sexuality connect to perceptual experience and theological imagination. Peckruhn offers historical and cultural comparisons, showing how sensory experience can order normalcy, social status, and communal belonging. She argues that scholars who appeal to the importance of bodily experiences need to acquire a robust and nuanced understanding of how sensory perceptions and interactions are cultural and theological acts of making meaning. This is a critical volume for feminist theorists and theologians, critical race theorists, scholars of disability and embodiment, and liberation thinkers who take experiences seriously as sources for theologizing and religious analysis.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780190655129
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	05/01/2017
Series:	AAR Academy Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Heike Peckruhn is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Daemen College in Amherst, New York.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Part ONE: Bodies and Theologies Chapter 1: Bodily Experience and Constructive Theology Chapter 2: Situating Feminist Theologies Phenomenologically Part TWO: Bodily Perceptual Orientations Chapter 3: Moving Through Experiencing Gender Chapter 4: Sedimentation of Habits and Orienting Experiences Chapter 5: Language and Perception of Normalcy Conclusion Part THREE: Perceiving Body Theology Chapter 6: Revisiting Body Theology Approaches Chapter 7: Orienting Familiar Body Theologies Chapter 8: Sensing Futurities To Continue Bibliography

Editorial Reviews

"This exciting new body theology advances on theologies that think about the body by exploring how bodies themselves make meaning. Through cross-cultural examples that destabilize perception's universality, Peckruhn's analyses of gender, racialization, and normalcy inject fresh momentum into stalled conversations on human difference." -Michelle Voss Roberts, author of Tastes of the Divine

"Peckruhn presents a tour de force with this phenomenological approach to the theological imagination and feminist thought about why and how bodies matter. Grounded in Merleau-Ponty and feminist interlocutors, she uncovers the intersections and non-dominant hermeneutics of gender, race, and disability. Comprehensive and compelling, Peckruhn raises both perception and bodily experience—from the hearth to the academy—as the provenance of human meaning making and where theology may matter most." -Mary Jo Iozzio, Professor of Moral Theology, Boston College

From the Publisher