Divine Flesh, Embodied Word

Divine Flesh, Embodied Word
Author: Anne-Claire Mulder
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Total Pages: 412
Release: 2006
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9085551013

What has Luce Irigaray’s statement that women need a God to do with her thoughts on the relation between body and mind, or the sensible and the intelligible? Using the theological notion ‘incarnation’ as a hermeneutical key, Anne-Claire Mulder brings together and illuminates the interrelations between these different themes in Luce Irigaray’s work. Seesawing between Luce Irigaray’s critique of philosophical discourse and her constructive philosophy, Mulder elucidates Irigaray’s thoughts on the relations between ‘becoming woman’ and ‘becoming divine’. She shows that Luce Irigaray’s restaging of the relation between the sensible and the intelligible, between flesh and Word, is key to her reinterpretation of the relation between woman and God. In and through her interpretation of Luce Irigaray’s thoughts on the flesh she argues that the relation between flesh and Word must be seen as a dialectical one, instead of as a dualistic relation. This means that ‘incarnation’ is no longer seen as a one-way process of Word becoming flesh, but as a continuing process of flesh becoming word and word becoming flesh. For all images and thoughts – including those of ‘God’ – are produced by the flesh, divine in its creativity inexhaustibility, in response to the touch of the other. And these images, thoughts, words in turn become embodied, by touching and moving the flesh of the subject.

Who is Afraid of Postmodernism?

Who is Afraid of Postmodernism?
Author: Stephan Erp
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
Total Pages: 124
Release: 2005
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9783825887810

To the authors of this book, today's world is "postmodern". They see a fragmented world. It seems to have become implausible to find a common point of view, a unity in purpose or truth. Postmodernity challenges Christian faith, because it appears to go against the very grain of a sense of tradition, communion, and commitment. On the eve of his election pope Benedict XVI warned against the "dictatorship of relativism". Would it still be possible to find genuine Christian ways to live in postmodern times? This collection of essays by a group of Dutch theologians will stimulate the imagination of anyone who reads them.

Reinterpreting the Eucharist

Reinterpreting the Eucharist
Author: Anne F. Elvey
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2014-10-14
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1317544072

The Eucharist continues to be central to contemporary Christian religious tradition and to be the focus for a wide range of assumptions and disputes. Chief amongst these disputes is the role of women in the theology and the ritual of the Eucharist.Reinterpreting the Eucharist brings together a diverse range of voices with each using their own marginalized experience to explore other ways – indigenous culture, medieval and contemporary art, social history, and environmental ethics – of engaging with the Eucharist. Presenting new forms of theological and ethical engagement, the book responds to the challenge of reconsidering the meaning of the Eucharist today.

The Boundaries of Monotheism

The Boundaries of Monotheism
Author: Maaike de Haardt
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2009-01-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9047426630

What is the significance of monotheism in modern western culture, taking into account both its problematic and promising aspects? Biblical texts and the biblical faith traditions bear a continuous, polemical tension between exclusive and inclusive perceptions and interpretations of monotheism. Western monotheism proves itself to be multi-significant and heterogeneous, producing boundary-setting as well as boundary-crossing tendencies, is the common thesis of the authors of this book, who have been collectively debating this theme for two years in an interdisciplinary scholarly setting. Their contributions range from the fields of biblical and religious studies, history and philosophy of religion, systematic theology, to gender studies in theology and religion.The authors also explain the particular contribution of their own theological discipline to these debates.

Re-riting Woman

Re-riting Woman
Author: Kristy S. Coleman
Publisher: Rowman Altamira
Total Pages: 268
Release: 2009
Genre: Goddess religion
ISBN: 0759110026

Re-riting Woman is an ethnographic study of Dianic Wicca, a modern Pagan religion in which the divine is solely feminine. Kristy S. Coleman explores Dianic Witchcraft, what it really means to practice Wicca today, and how our understanding of womanhood can change with the experience of a divine feminine.

The Discovery of Anxiousness

The Discovery of Anxiousness
Author: Joana Serrado
Publisher: transcript Verlag
Total Pages: 277
Release: 2023-12-31
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 383946532X

Are anxiety or dread negative stages before freedom, a confrontation with humans' own mortality and finitude? Joana Serrado inaugurates anxiousness as a category of mystical knowledge in this innovative historical and philosophical study. Based on the life and mystical writings of Joana de Jesus, a Cistercian nun, intellectual disciple of Teresa of Avila, this study shows the cultural embeddedness of anxiousness: a feeling akin to the Portuguese term »saudade« (yearning, Sehnsucht). A mystical project that reshapes feminist principles of autonomy, agency and desire.

Feminist Theology and Contemporary Dieting Culture

Feminist Theology and Contemporary Dieting Culture
Author: Hannah Bacon
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Total Pages: 357
Release: 2019-08-08
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0567659968

Hannah Bacon draws on qualitative research conducted inside one UK secular commercial weight loss group to show how Christian religious forms and theological discourses inform contemporary weight-loss narratives. Bacon argues that notions of sin and salvation resurface in secular guise in ways that repeat well-established theological meanings. The slimming organization recycles the Christian terminology of sin – spelt 'Syn' – and encourages members to frame weight loss in salvific terms. These theological tropes lurk in the background helping to align food once more with guilt and moral weakness, but they also mirror to an extent the way body policing techniques in Christianity have historically helped to cultivate self-care. The self-breaking and self-making aspects of women's Syn-watching practices in the group continue certain features of historical Christianity, serving in similar ways to conform women's bodies to patriarchal norms while providing opportunities for women's self-development. Taking into account these tensions, Bacon asks what a specifically feminist theological response to weight loss might look like. If ideas about sin and salvation service hegemonic discourses about fat while also empowering women to shape their own lives, how might they be rethought to challenge fat phobia and the frenetic pursuit of thinness? As well as naming as 'sin' principles and practices which diminish women's appetites and bodies, this book forwards a number of proposals about how salvation might be performed in our everyday eating habits and through the cultivation of fat pride. It takes seriously the conviction of many women in the group that food and the body can be important sites of power, wisdom and transformation, but channels this insight into the construction of theologies that resist rather than reproduce thin privilege and size-ist norms.

Before the Face of God

Before the Face of God
Author: Hanneke Schaap-Jonker
Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster
Total Pages: 383
Release: 2008
Genre: Gottesvorstellung
ISBN: 3825814327

All over the world, millions of people attend services every week, and most of them will hear sermons. What happens between the sermon and the listener? Does the sermon become meaningful to listeners? The present study in the fields of practical theology, homiletics, and psychology of religion combines quantitative and qualitative methods to offer an empirically-based approach to the study of preaching. Highlighting the psychological factors influencing how a sermon is heard, this study draws theoretical insight from the works of D.W. Winnicott, A.-M. Rizzuto and D. Bonhoeffer in its examination of the relationship between the meaning of the sermon and the hearer's God image, personality, and affective state.

What Is Sexual Difference?

What Is Sexual Difference?
Author: Mary C. Rawlinson
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2023-06-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0231554680

Luce Irigaray has written that “sexual difference is one of the major philosophical issues, if not the issue, of our age.” Spanning metaphysics, phenomenology, and psychoanalysis, her work examines how sexual difference structures being and subjectivity, organizes our experience of the world, and affects the images and discourses involved in knowledge production and practical action. No other philosopher has paid such careful attention to the consequences of the elision of sexual difference in philosophical thought. However, at a time when notions of sexual and gender difference are hotly contested, Irigaray’s thought has often been dismissed as essentialist or reductively binary. This book brings together leading scholars to consider the philosophical implications of Irigaray’s writing on sexual difference, particularly for issues of gender and race. Their essays directly confront the charge of essentialism, exploring how Irigaray’s thought opens new possibilities for understanding the complexity of gender identities, including nonbinary and trans experiences as well as alternative configurations of masculinity and femininity. Though Irigaray is sometimes accused of a failure to appreciate racial difference, contributors show the productive role of her work in thinking race. This book also illuminates how Irigaray’s work provides creative practices that help realign human experience and our relations with nature and each other.

Unconscious Incarnations

Unconscious Incarnations
Author: Brian W. Becker
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 247
Release: 2018-04-27
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1351180177

Unconscious Incarnations considers the status of the body in psychoanalytic theory and practice, bringing Freud and Lacan into conversation with continental philosophy to explore the heterogeneity of embodied life. By doing so, the body is no longer merely an object of scientific inquiry but also a lived body, a source of excessive intuition and affectivity, and a raw animality distinct from mere materiality. The contributors to this volume consist of philosophers, psychoanalytic scholars, and practitioners whose interdisciplinary explorations reformulate traditional psychoanalytic concepts such as trauma, healing, desire, subjectivity, and the unconscious. Collectively, they build toward the conclusion that phenomenologies of embodiment move psychoanalytic theory and practice away from representationalist models and toward an incarnational approach to psychic life. Under such a carnal horizon, trauma manifests as wounds and scars, therapy as touch, subjectivity as bodily boundedness, and the unconscious ‘real’ as an excessive remainder of flesh. Unconscious incarnations signal events where the unsignifiable appears among signifiers, the invisible within the visible, and absence within presence. In sum: where the flesh becomes word and the word retains its flesh. Unconscious Incarnations seeks to evoke this incarnational approach in order to break through tacit taboos toward the body in psychology and psychoanalysis. This interdisciplinary work will appeal greatly to psychoanalysts and psychoanalytic psychotherapists as well as philosophy scholars and clinical psychologists.