Includes bibliographical references (pages 293-310) and index.
Contents:
Part 1. Bodies and theologies. Experience and constructive theology -- Situating feminist theologies phenomenologically -- Part 2. Bodily perceptual orientations. Moving through experiencing gender -- Sedimentation of habits and orienting experiences -- Language and perception of normalcy -- Part 3. Perceiving body theology. Revisiting body theology approaches -- Orienting familiar body theologies -- Sensing futurities.
Summary:
Movement, smell, vision, and other perceptual experiences are ways of thinking and orienting ourselves in the world. And yet the appeal to experience as resource for theology, though a significant shift in contemporary scholarship, has seldom received nuanced investigation. How do embodied differences like gender, race, disability, and sexuality highlight theological analysis and connect to perceptual experience and theological imagination? In Meaning in Our Bodies, Heike Peckruhn offers historical and cultural comparisons, showing how sensory experience may order normalcy, social status, or communal belonging. Ultimately, 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 resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.