physical touch – Feminism and Religion

Touch, Intimacy, and the Christian Tradition by Stephanie Arel

I’ve been thinking more and more about physical touch, a subject I explore in my first book Affect Theory, Shame, and Christian Formation. The concept of touch – its presence and its frequent absence – beckons me again. In several posts, I will explore aspects of touch to get to my central concern – how good touch indicate, supports, and fosters intimacy, something confounding in human relationality. For this post, I consider the Christian tradition and touch.

In Tactile Engagements in Christian Understanding, Teresa Swan Tuite examines touch in biblical history as one way of “making explicit the ways in which bodies give sense to the theological landscape.” Swan Tuite brings to bear the notion of being known through touch, using as one example the disciple’s recognition of Jesus through touch in the Gospel of John. Caravaggio’s famous painting The Incredulity of St. Thomas depicts the scene which Shelly Rambo details in her blog post on this site.

Re-Anointing the Body by Eline Kieft

How ‘at one’ are you with your body, and what reasons might there be if your body-sense got separate(d) from your soul-sense?

This piece starts with the difference between feminine and masculine spirituality, and introduces a few reasons why living in a physical body isn’t always easy.

It then invites a shift to the beloved body and how we can start to re-instate our body as a sacred place and love it from within.

Asking for Help by Carol P. Christ

I climbed trees and rode my bike and roller skated on sidewalks for hours on end when I was a child. As an adult, I have always been physically strong without having to work at it. Nor have I had to think much about my health. I have been able to trust my body to do pretty much everything I wanted it to do. I am also fiercely independent. And I don’t always like to be touched because my body is extremely sensitive to other people’s energies.

On the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete I was always the first one in and out of the caves and usually the first or one of the first up and down the mountains too. This changed when I injured my knee a few years ago in one of the caves and then six months later re-injured it in a fall on my front steps. I was told not to stress my knee by the pharmacist, and as a consequence stopped walking and doing yoga. I began to lose my physical strength. Continue reading “Asking for Help by Carol P. Christ”