Issue 23: Body

Scripture invites us into a different relationship with our bodies than our Greco-Christian worldviews, a relationship that sees our bodies as intrinsic to a holistic faith. In other words, to be faithful is to view the body as good and as essential to our worship and creaturely existence. For this, our twenty-third issue, we explore how this perspective might in- form our sense of romance and sexuality, our relationship with pain and technology, and the ways our bodies betray us and help us to see the world and God differently.

Tyler McCabe

Painlove

Tyler McCabe grieves the death of his cousin and considers how the body conducts pain.

Jennifer Strange

Origin Stories

My mother idolized the pampas grass and my father idolized the peppers that fell when I was born.

Ragan Sutterfield

You Should Give a Shit

How we treat our relationship to the cycle of nutrients—the food that goes into our bodies and leaves it—has more to say about our view of incarnation than do most of our creeds.

Jen Grabarczyk-Turner, Joyce Polance

Quiet Storms: The Paintings of Women by Joyce Polance

A look at recent work from artist Joyce Polance, who explores through female nude figurative paintings the emotional curvature and complexity of women in friendship and life together.

Joshua Ramos

Nativity: Embodiment of Future and Faith

The fertility gap between the religious and nonreligious will be a primary factor in the reversal of Western secularization, argues Joshua Ramos.

Rebecca Lauren

Eve’s Side

In this poem by Rebecca Lauren, Eve speaks of creation.

Rebecca Parker Payne

This Cursed Womb

This essay explores the space between the physical and the spiritual where the Eden curse still interferes and casts a visceral darkness over women today.

Philip C. Kolin

The Canonization of Emmett Till

This poem compares the martyrdom of Emmett Till to St. Moses the Ethiopian, the patron saint of Africa; both saints share the same feast day.

Wesley Hill

The Problem of Gay Friendship

Wesley Hill on whether it’s possible to reclaim a classic, orthodox Christian theology of friendship in the context of the gay Christian experience.

Jo-Ann Badley

Body Lost, Body Broken, Body Raised

Recent attention to the body opens a discussion of bodily practices to which St. Paul contributes principles for Christian practice.

Collin Cornell

Reenchanting the Body

In this essay, Collin Cornell interrogates the modern, disenchanted body and explores avenues for reenchantment through two biblical themes, law and powers.

Amy Frykholm

Hunger

A meeting with an Orthodox priest changes a woman’s understanding of the relationship between the spiritual and the physical.

Hannah Peckham

We Are All Magical Thinkers: A Review of Searching for Zion

An engaging blend of memoir and cultural analysis, Emily Raboteau’s Searching for Zion tells the stories of various communities in the African Diaspora as well as her own search for home in a supposedly post-racial America.

Matthew Shedden

An Ordinary Nine Innings

Our Praxis editor reviews a new book by John Sexton, Baseball as a Road to God.

Peter Cooley

Rodin, Despair

An articulation of how Rodin’s theory of the unfinished in art is embodied in his statue “Despair.”

TOJ Editors

#23: The Body Issue

Since the time of the early Greeks, Western thought has tended to downplay the importance of the body. By emphasizing the existence of an eternal realm of ideal forms above and beyond the material world, we have indirectly transformed the body into little more than a vessel for our true immortal souls. We may say […]