The Routledge Handbook of Religion and the Body

Description

The Routledge Handbook of Religion and the Body is the first comprehensive volume to feature multireligious cross-cultural perspectives on the body and embodiment. Featuring multidisciplinary approaches and methodologies from the humanities and the social sciences, it addresses the body and embodied religiosity in theological, ethical, and cultural contexts. Comprised of 30 chapters by a team of international contributors, the handbook is divided into four parts Theology and Embodied Religiosity Gender, Sexuality, and Body Regulations Ritual and Performance Religion, Healing, and the Future of the Body Each part examines central issues, debates, and problems in relation to global belief systems, including embodiments of love, transfiguration, the secular body, disability, body language, maternal bodies, embodied emotions, celibacy, ecology and the body, reshaping the corporal body, initiation rites, physiology, Tantra, Reiki practice, religious experience, technological body modifications, and ethics and the body. Providing a breadth of rich and innovative research, it is a must-read for students and scholars in religious studies, theology, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, and cultural and gender studies. Cover Half Title Series Title Copyright Contents List of Contributors Introduction Part I Theology and Embodied Religiosity 1 Subtle Bodies and Ecology: Intersubjectivity, Alterity, and New Materialism 2 Affect and Embodied Emotions 3 Embodiments of Love in Jewish Sources 4 Apophatic Theophanies: Incarnational Knowledge of God in Early Eastern Christianity 5 Disability and Embodied Theology 6 “We Shall Do and We Shall Understand”: Embodied Theology in Modern Judaism 7 Transfiguration 8 The Ruse of Body Language among Muslim Traditionists 9 Avoidance, Aversion, and Intellectualization: Embodied Brokenness in White Christianity 10 Ecological Theology and the Body Part II Gender, Sexuality, and Body Regulations 11 Bodies of Becoming: The Regulation of Religion and Gender and the Subjectivation of the Secular Body 12 Maternal Bodies and Religions 13 Semen and the Self in a Teaching and Prayer 14 “I Too Desired a Child”: Sufi Hagiography, Ibn Khafif, and the Problem of Celibacy 15 Corporeal Conscientization: Heralding the Good News of Black Women’s Bodies 16 Islamic Shi’i Ethics and the Biopolitics of the Maternal Body Part III Ritual and Performance 17 Tantric Bodies, AI Immortality, and a Yogurt Model of Self 18 Holy Heads: Re­Membering John the Baptist and Husayn in Early Christian and Islamic Pilgrimage 19 Mothers in the Temple: Motherhood, Filial Piety, and Salvation Rituals in Premodern Japanese Buddhism 20 Body, Community, Cosmos: A Śaiva Siddhānta Rite of Initiation 21 (In)Conspicuous Consumption: Food, the Child Body, and Inversion of Hard­Core Rituals in Hindu Tantras 22 The Buddhist Body in a Pill: Notes Towards a Material History of Tantra in Tibet 23 Performing Kṛṣṇa’s Body in Kerala 24 Sikh Langar: Tasting the Transcendent Part IV Religion, Healing, and the Future of the Body 25 Reiki Practice and the Body as Mediator for Religiosity 26 Further Explorations of/in Daoist Embodiment 27 Spiritual Contraptions: Religious Experience and Psychiatrized Bodies in the Nineteenth Century 28 The Thai Body: Understanding the Principles of Medicine, Physiology, and the Massage Tradition through Inscriptions, Texts, and the Material Culture of Wat Phō 29 Religion, Body, Excreta 30 The Future Body: Religious Approaches to Advanced Technological Body Modifications Index