Honoring the Body: Meditations on a Christian Practice

"Here is a book we have needed for a long time, a book that will help Christians— who affirm that ′the Word became flesh′— overcome their baffling historic aversion to the body and learn to honor it. Stephanie Paulsell is a wise and compassionate guide, and she has given us the most compelling treatment of this topic I′ve ever read. May her insights be received, and embodied, by many." — Parker Palmer , author, Let Your Life Speak and The Courage to Teach " Honoring the Body is an elegantly written book. It is filled with wisdom, insight from the Christian tradition, and incisive analysis of a crucial yet vexing practice of Christian life. It also is eminently practical, a call to transformed thinking and living. I heartily commend it." — L. Gregory Jones , author, Embodying Forgiveness , and dean of Duke Divinity School "As I read through Paulsell′s book, I found myself laughing one moment and crying the next, and what′s even more amazing, throughout it all, I found myself thinking, thinking deeply and in new ways about not only great ′theological truths′ but about little things like how I bathe, why I run, and who set the dinner table. A remarkable and rare book." — Serene Jones , author, Feminist Theory and Christian Theology: Cartographies of Grace, and associate professor of theology at Yale Divinity School "A profound, passionate, and exquisitely ′simple′ Christian meditation on the messy and beautiful facts of embodied human life." — Kathryn E. Tanner , author, Theories of Culture, The Politics of God, and God and Creation in Christian Theology, and professor of theology at the University of Chicago Divinity School

The Editor′s Foreword. Preface. Acknowledgments. Chapter 1: Awakening to Sacred Vulnerability. Chapter 2: Pondering the Mystery of the Body. Chapter 3: Bathing the Body. Chapter 4: Clothing the Body. Chapter 5: Nourishing the Body. Chapter 6: Blessing Our Table Life. Chapter 7: Exerting and Resting the Body. Chapter 8: Honoring the Sexual Body. Chapter 9: Honoring the Suffering Body. References. The Author. Index.

Stephanie Paulsell teaches at Harvard Divinity School. She is the former director of ministry studies and senior lecturer in religion and literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School and is a minister in the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ).