The Body in Religion Cross-Cultural Perspectives [Hardcover]

The Body in Religion: Cross-Cultural Perspectivessurveys influential ways in which the body is imagined and deployed in religious practices and beliefs across the globe. Filling the gap for an up-to-date and comparative approach to theories and practices of the body in religion, this book explores the cultural influences on embodiment and their implications for religious institutions and spirituality. Examples are drawn from religions such as Jainism, Confucianism, Daoism, Shintoism, Paganism, Aboriginal, African, and Native American religions, in addition to the five major religions of the world.

Topics covered include:

- Gender and sexuality
- Female modesty and dress codes
- Circumcision and menstruation rituals
- God language and erotic desire
- Death, dying, and burial rites
- Disciplining the body through prayer, yoga, and meditation
- Feasting and fasting rituals

Illustrated throughout with over 60 images,The Body in Religionis designed for course use in religious studies as well as interdisciplinary courses across the humanities and the social sciences. Further online resources include a sample syllabus.

Greenberg skillfully draws out the central place of the body in shaping religious and social identities, as well as how various traditions interpret the body as a physical phenomenon and as a site of social and symbolic meaning. Furthermore, the reader is introduced to the problems of essentialism and dualist frameworks that permeate many traditions, especially in terms of asymmetrical hierarchies between mind and body, subject and object, reason and emotion, spirit and matter, transcendence and immanence, and male and female. -Reading Religion

This rigorous and carefully written book opens news chapters in the history of Muslim Britons and will be of interest to researchers of religious conversion, contemporary Islamic studies, and the sociology of religion. -Reading ReligionlÃ)