It is now generally accepted that the nature of human thought has much to do with the structure and function of the human body. In Spirituality in the Flesh, Robert C. Fuller investigates how our sensory organs, emotional programs, sexual sensibilities, and neural structures shape religious phenomena. 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? The body has recently become a subject of investigation among scholars of religion. Many such studies focus on the concept of the body as a cultural construct. Whereas these treatments helpfully demonstrate how cultures construct ideas about the body, Fuller asks how the body itself influences religious concepts. Seeking to establish a middle ground between purely materialistic or humanistic arguments, he skillfully pairs scientific findings with religious truths. Both perspectives could learn from the other: Fuller takes 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 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 our unprecedented understanding of bodily states with an experts knowledge of religious phenomena. Culling insights from scientific observations, historical allusions, and literary references, Spirituality in the Flesh provides fresh understandings that promise to enrich our appreciation of the embodied religious experience.

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

Reviews
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 evolution. To 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 *



Book Information
ISBN 9780195369175
Author Robert C. Fuller
Format Hardback
Page Count 208
Imprint Oxford University Press Inc
Publisher Oxford University Press Inc
Weight(grams) 428g
Dimensions(mm) 240mm * 165mm * 20mm