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125 pages

English

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The body is crucial to religious life, but there has been little practical attention to how to make a helpful reality of this fact. Strong forms of philosophical dualism have been widely abandoned by post-war theologians in favour of a more integrated view of human nature, but guidance on the role of the body in Christian spirituality remains fragmentary.
Focusing particularly on drawing out practical implications for religious life and ministry, this book will survey the many ways in which the body plays an important role in religions and spiritual life, drawing on scientific research, theology and philosophy.

Sujets

Religion

Christianisme

Christian Theology

Philosophie et théologie

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Publié par	Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd
Date de parution	30 avril 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9780334060093
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

A Plea for Embodied Spirituality
The Role of the Body in Religion
Fraser Watts

© Fraser Watts 2021
Published in 2021 by SCM Press
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SCM Press is an imprint of Hymns Ancient & Modern Ltd (a registered charity)

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The Author has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the Author of this Work
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicized Edition, copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
978-0-33406-007-9
Typeset by Regent Typesetting
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Contents
Acknowledgements

1. Introduction
2. Minds, Bodies and Persons
3. The Embodied Origins of Religion
4. The Ascetic Life
5. Extreme Spirituality as ‘Flow’ Experience
6. Attending to Our Bodies
7. Embodiment: Postures and Meanings
8. Enacting Liturgy
9. Emotions and their Expression
10. Healing
11. Spiritual Bodies, Apparitions and Visions
12. Concluding Reflections

Appendix: The Body in World Faith Traditions by Sara Savage
References and Further Reading

For
Roger Bretherton
and
James W. Jones

and to the memory of
Owen Barfield

Acknowledgements
I am much indebted to the John Templeton Foundation for the grant that funded my Embodied Cognition Project, and to all the colleagues who worked with me on the project, especially my friend and colleague Léon Turner, and also James W. Jones, whose book Living Religion (2019) was a great help in preparing this one. Léon Turner and I also worked with Robin Dunbar, Miguel Farias and others on a project entitled Religion and the Social Brain, funded by the Templeton Religion Trust, which underpins Chapter 3.
There are other friends and colleagues whose work has been very helpful at particular points. I am grateful to Rupert Sheldrake, a fellow ‘Epiphany Philosopher’, for his recent books on spiritual practices ( Science and Spiritual Practices (2017) and Ways to Go Beyond and Why They Work: Seven Spiritual Practices in a Scientific Age (2019)), which have fed into Chapters 4, 5 and 6; to Mark Williams for help with mindfulness in Chapter 6, and to Thomas Dixon, whose work on emotion helped me with Chapter 9.
Chapter 10 on spiritual healing arises from a Humble Approach Initiative on spiritual healing, funded by the John Templeton Foundation, that met in Cambridge in 2004, and which I had the pleasure of co-chairing with Sarah Coakley. Two edited books came from that consultation, Spiritual Healing: Scientific and Religious Perspectives (Watts, 2011a), and Spiritual Healing: Science, Meaning, and Discernment (Coakley, 2020).
I am also very grateful to Sara Savage for allowing me to publish her excellent essay on the body in world religions as an Appendix in this book, and a big thank you goes to Geoff Dumbreck and Bonnie Poon Zahl, who helped her in its preparation. It is a very valuable resource and I am delighted that it has been possible to publish it here.

1. Introduction
The body is strangely neglected in religious practice. We humans are embodied creatures, so the body is inevitably involved in religion in some way or other. However, there seems to be a strange lack of interest in many circles in how people are using their bodies in religious and spiritual practice, with the result that many religious people don’t use them as well or as skilfully as they might. When it comes to religion and spirituality, we just don’t, for the most part, operate as though mind and body were integrated facets of a single, whole human person.
There are exceptions, of course, and it is striking that those forms of religious and spiritual practice that take the body seriously are those that are growing most conspicuously at the present time. Pentecostal religion makes good use of the body, and Pentecostalism is currently the fastest growing form of Christianity. Meditation in general, and mindfulness in particular, often make very deliberate and carefully considered use of the body, and mindfulness is also growing rapidly at present.
I think it would be reasonable to say that forms of religion and spirituality that make full use of the body are growing, and other forms that neglect it are in decline. The conclusion I draw is that if those involved in religion and spirituality want them to grow, they should take the body more seriously. Apart from the exceptions I have mentioned, the implicit assumption seems to be that religion and spirituality are not primarily about the body.
This book was written during the coronavirus pandemic in which large numbers of people became physically ill, and many died. However, there has been a conspicuous silence from most religious leaders about the body. Many churches regularly offer prayer for healing, but in this medical crisis almost nothing was said about the possibility of the healing of the body. Also, though many died, almost nothing was said by religious leaders about the death of the body, or what might lie beyond physical death. The implicit assumption seems to be that religion is religion, and what happens to the body is something else.
The widespread lack of interest in the body in religion is puzzling. It seems to reflect a kind of dualism. The implicit assumption seems to be that religion is about mind, soul and spirit, but not really about the body. Philosophers who consider the relationship between mind and body have, in the period since the Second World War, largely moved on from dualism. Intellectually, we seem to have become entirely persuaded that people are integrated wholes, with embodied minds or ensouled bodies.
However, this official philosophical rejection of dualism seems to be accompanied by a good deal of residual, implicit dualism among the general public. It is bizarre that people even consider it to be a line of defence in a court of law that their neurones (or genes) made them do what they did, as though their neurones were not really them, but something separate or alien (Wiseman, 2019). As Mary Midgley has argued in her trenchant way, when we do things, it is we who do what we do, not some bit of us (Midgley, 2010).
The central theme of this book is that the body can play an important role in the religious life. Indeed, it is hard to be religious in a purely mental or spiritual way, without drawing on the resources of the body. However, for various reasons, including philosophical dualism and moral panic about carnal pleasures, the crucial role of the body in religion is often not fully acknowledged.
I hope this book will help to overcome this curious avoidance of the important role of the body in religion. The body does actually play a very important role in religion, in all sorts of ways, even though religious instruction tends to focus more on the mental aspects of religion, especially on what to believe. Participants in mainline Christianity are given relatively little help in how to use their bodies wisely and skilfully in practising their faith. This book will consider the contribution of the body to religious life more explicitly, and I hope that it will help people to use the body more effectively in their spiritual practices.
I believe that wise use of the body in the religious life can lead to the spiritual transformation of the person. The whole person can be transformed, not just mind and heart, but also the body. The body in itself can begin to participate in what St John’s Gospel calls ‘eternal life’. Contemporary religion has largely neglected the call to offer our bodies for redemption and transformation. This book tries to set out what is possible, and how it can come about.
There are thus religious reasons for focusing on the role of the body in religion. Forms of religion that neglect the role of the body are truncated, and are likely to have limited appeal. If religion is to fulfil its potential to transform people, it is important to understand the potential role of the body and to use the body wisely. I believe that the lack of understanding of the role of the body in religion is contributing to the drift away from organized religion in our time.
Embodied Cognition
The body is also neglected in our present understanding of religion. It would be an exaggeration to say that no one in religious studies is considering the body, and I have discovered a surprisingly rich and extensive literature in the course of writing this book. However, the body is not a coherent subfield of research in the study of religion. One striking feature of that is that the authors of most of the books to which I refer here seem unaware of other books on religion and the body. In that sense, it is a very scattered literature.
My approach here will be multidisciplinary, drawing on theology, religious studies, psychology, history, biology and social science. Understanding the potential of the b