Meaning in Our Bodies Sensory Experience as Constructive Theological Imagination

Movement, smell, vision, and other perceptual experiences are ways of thinking and orienting ourselves in the world and are increasingly recognized as important resources for theology. In Meaning in Our Bodies, Heike Peckruhn seeks to discover how embodied differences like gender, race, disability, and sexuality connect to perceptual experience and theological imagination. Peckruhn offers historical and cultural comparisons, showing how sensory experience can order normalcy, social status, and communal belonging. 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 is a critical volume for feminist theorists and theologians, critical race theorists, scholars of disability and embodiment, and liberation thinkers who take experiences seriously as sources for theologizing and religious analysis.

Heike Peckruhn is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Daemen College in Amherst, New York.

Acknowledgments

Part ONE: Bodies and Theologies
Chapter 1: Bodily Experience and Constructive Theology
Chapter 2: Situating Feminist Theologies Phenomenologically

Part TWO: Bodily Perceptual Orientations
Chapter 3: Moving Through Experiencing Gender
Chapter 4: Sedimentation of Habits and Orienting Experiences
Chapter 5: Language and Perception of Normalcy
Conclusion

Part THREE: Perceiving Body Theology
Chapter 6: Revisiting Body Theology Approaches
Chapter 7: Orienting Familiar Body Theologies
Chapter 8: Sensing Futurities

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Bibliography