Religion the Body

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

We often regard religion as a matter of faith or thought. But what is the religious role of the body? How is the body implicated in religious ideas and in religious experience? Drawing on the major religious tradition of Asia and the West as well as indigenous traditions and new religious movements, this course will look at the variety of religious phenomena that speak to the human body. This will include the eyes, ears, skin, feet, hands, sexual organs and stomach as the focus of religious expression and as the conduits of spiritual experiences. We shall look at pleasure, pain, effort, work, games, rituals and festivals in which the body plays a major role in symbolically expressing ideas about transcendent reality but also serve as the means for experiencing these ideas concretely. We shall look at the ways the religions have been complicit in controlling and modifying the body in order to perpetuate social and political oppression but also at the ways in which religions have used the body to liberate us from the limits of mere individuality.