Spirituality in the Flesh

Spirituality in the Flesh by Robert C Fuller

It is now generally accepted that the structure and function of the human body deeply influence the nature of human thought. As a consequence, our religious experiences are at least partially determined by our sensory organs, emotional programs, sexual sensibilities, and the neural framework of our brains. In Spirituality in the Flesh, Robert C. Fuller investigates how studying the body can help us to answer the profoundest spiritual questions. Why is it that some religious traditions assign spiritual currency to pain? How do neurochemically driven emotions, such as fear, shape our religious actions? What is the relationship between chemically altered states of consciousness and religious innovation? Using recent biological research to illuminate religious beliefs and practices, Fuller delves into topics as diverse as apocalypticism, nature religion, Native American peyotism, and the sexual experimentalism of nineteenth-century communal societies, in every case seeking middle ground between the arguments currently emanating from scientists and humanists. He takes most scientific interpreters to task for failing to understand the inherently cultural aspects of embodied experience even as he chides most religion scholars for ignoring new knowledge about the biological substrates of human thought and behavior. Comfortable with the language of scientific analysis and sympathetic to the inherently subjective aspects of religious events, Fuller introduces the biological study of religion by joining together this era's unprecedented understanding of bodily states with an expert's knowledge of religious phenomena. Culling together insights from scientific observations, historical allusions, and literary references, Spirituality in the Flesh offers a bold look at the biological underpinnings of religion and opens up new and exciting agendas for understanding the nature and value of human religiosity.

In this work of broad scholarly foundations, Robert Fuller demonstrates that an emphasis on religion's ultimate grounding in human embodiment - in our genetic dispositions, the electro-chemical activity of our brains, our sexual impulses, and our experience of the body in sickness and health - need not reduce human piety to a meaningless or merely functional by-product of human evolutionTo the contrary, this fundamental principle provides Fuller with a context in which to explore in depth the richness of religious traditions and spiritual practices as they have been formed by bodily dispositions and as they shape our experiences of the world and ourselves in turn. * David Wulff, Professor of Psychology, Wheaton College, author of Psychology of Religion: Classic and Contemporary *

Caterpillar Professor of Religious Studies, Bradley University. He received his B.A. at Denison University and his PhD at the University of Chicago.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780195369175
ISBN 10	0195369173
Title	Spirituality in the Flesh
Author	Robert C Fuller
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Oxford University Press Inc
Year published	2008-09-04
Number of pages	208
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.