Sensing Sacred
Exploring the Human Senses in Practical Theology and Pastoral Care
Contributions by Stephanie Arel, Jennifer Baldwin, John Carr, Christina Davis, Shirley Guider, Jason Hays, Martha Jacobi, Emmanuel Y. Lartey, Bonnie Miller-McLemore, Kenya Tuttle, Sonia Waters Edited by Jennifer Baldwin
Not available to order
Publication date:
30 August 2016Length of book:
206 pagesPublisher
Lexington BooksISBN-13: 9781498531245
Sensing Sacred is an edited volume that explores the critical intersection of “religion” and “body” through the religious lens of practical theology, with an emphasis on sensation as the embodied means in which human beings know themselves, others, and the divine in the world. The manuscript argues that all human interaction and practice, including religious praxis, engages “body” through at least one of the human senses (touch, smell, hearing, taste, sight, kinestics/proprioception). Unfortunately, body—and, more specifically and ironically, sensation—is eclipsed in contemporary academic scholarship that is inherently bent toward the realm of theory and ideas. This is unfortunate because it neglects bodies, physical or communal, as the repository and generator of culturally conditioned ideas and theory. It is ironic because all knowledge transmission minimally requires several senses including sight, touch, and hearing. Sensing Sacred is organized into two parts. The first section devotes a chapter to each human sense as an avenue of accessing religious experience; while the second section explores religious practices as they specifically focus on one or more senses. The overarching aim of the volume is to explicitly highlight each sense and utilize the theoretical lenses of practical theology to bring to vivid life the connections between essential sensation and religious thinking and practice.
In a field that often makes the mistake of dealing in polarities (e.g. individual v. society, subject v. object, psyche v. body), this volume unites them, arguing that the body mediates personal, cultural, social, and religious experiences, and thus must be taken seriously as a site of knowing and healing. If practical theologians are to understand human being more fully, we must contend with physicality. This collection of essays invites readers into this complex work of taking embodied selves seriously, and encourages us to value them as loci of wisdom and theological insight.