Bodies can be envisioned in a multitude of ways that simultaneously help and hinder the religious imagination and experience: the flesh of a fat body reimagined as absently thin in the afterlife, the digital and simultaneously enfleshed body in the Zoom box, the malleable yet rigid embodiment of transness. This panel brings together five papers to think through the interconnection between bodies considered to be “other” and the associations of both violence and beauty that attend othered bodies. Based in theories of the body, this panel strives to envision bodies within religious spaces and identities that work through both positive and negative processes of enfleshment.
Since the first century, some Christians have brought dead bodies back to life through prayer. While hardly ubiquitous, dead-raising is part of the supernatural landscape of Pentecostalism and evangelicalism. According to William Seymour, leader of the Azusa Street Revival, Jesus commanded it. This paper explores dead-raising around Bethel Church, a charismatic evangelical California megachurch with international influence. I argue that dead-raising offers scholars a rich, albeit unnerving opportunity to examine our frameworks for studying time, death, and religious bodies. When the dead rise, the forward march of time is reversed. Moreover, dead-raisers argue that the imperishable resurrection bodies of the distant future—the “eschaton”—become available now such that nobody has to die, full stop. To examine dead-raising is to pursue the breadth of Christian supernatural practice and Christians’ always shifting engagement with death. It is to resist burying the sources of our discomfort in the religious worlds we study.
According to Euro-American discourse, fat people, and fat women in particular, lack a future. Not only are fat persons more likely to die prematurely, fatness presents as a threat to the future of the nation comparable with Covid and the climate crisis. Within this narrative, fatness emerges as a ‘biopolitical problem’ (Evans, 2009) that takes shape in the present through the futurizing of fatness. Lurking behind such dreams of a fat-free future is a set of misogynist and racist assumptions as well as the entrenched fat phobic belief that fat people, especially women, are disposable. However, such a futurizing of fat is also resourced by Western Christian ideas about eschatological bodies. Through an engagement with Augustine’s presentation of fatness and future heavenly bodies, I explore how the theological futurizing of fat can incentivise a hearty celebration of fatness, opening up history to alternative possibilities to the fat-shaming present.
The Christian hope for the future body is of perfection on the other side of resurrection—but what does embodied perfection entail? Many people in Christian faith communities share the assumptions of modern Western culture, uncritically absorbing and reproducing its stigmatising assumptions and body-shaming practices. This shapes their expectations of what the perfected resurrection body might look: slim, beautiful, and non-disabled. I will use a multi-layered account of identity to propose that the continuity of identity-forming embodied features is required to safeguard the continuity of identity through the transformation of resurrection. While we must admit a modest agnosticism regarding the actual outcome, the possibility of persons with disabilities and bodies of all sizes, shapes, and colours flourishing in the new creationchallenges our underlying assumptions about what bodies are good bodies. I will argue that human flourishing lies not in aesthetic flawlessness but in the fulfillment of the body’s *telos*.
This paper explores how racialized and gendered meaning-making occurs online by engaging feminist theorists in phenomenology, digital anthropology and biotechnology. This paper then considers the pedagogical implications of how the virtual bodies of women of color are located, perceived, and acted upon in the virtual learning landscape of theological education. These understandings are crucial to the application of engaged pedagogy in the virtual leaning landscape. Recognizing that to show up as one’s full self is to become vulnerable to violence, this paper concludes with an invitation to pedagogical promiscuity, an embodied learning approach that aims toward liberation for all learners.
In Alberta, Canada, current Premier Danielle Smith banned bottom surgery for transgender youth, despite the fact that no kids have received bottom surgery. Smith’s policies create the trans youth body as a site of panic and of parental control. “Body” and “flesh” are laden with Christian history, which marks some bodies as sinful and claims flesh as the defining characteristic of family bonds. Read through Hortense Spillers and the incarnation, flesh becomes a site of generative possibility, of interdependence. Interdependent flesh persists where the legal and normative family fails, allowing the wild creativity of gender diverse children to flourish as part of queer community.