Dazzling Bodies [Hardcover]

Spirituality is always developed and nurtured in community, and communities have particular spiritualities. Dazzling Bodies promotes practices and performances as the basis for individual and community spiritual formation by analyzing specific experiences and real-life situations in personal and corporate life. Three bodies are delineated as the basis for spiritual formation: the physical body, the social body, and the corporate body. Drawing on theories of communication (semiotics, social semiotics, and narrative theory), the book examines personal and corporate spiritual formation, both by plotting the ways community systems create solidarity, and by analyzing community systems for the modulation of power at work. Dazzling Bodies explores the development of a specific language system for each community, taking the sermon as the primary instrument of community formation. Liturgy and worship receive special attention. A theory of asceticism, based on specific performances, founded in renewed social relationships, and forming an alternative symbolic universe, provides parameters for individual and corporate spiritual formation. In this important book, Valanatasis criticizes the dominant understanding of 'spirituality' as addressed to a psychospiritual world within individuals. Instead, he advocates corporate spiritual formation in a liturgical community. Recognizing that 'ideas do not change people; experiences change people,' Valantasis brings together his academic and pastoral experience as well as his background in Greek Orthodoxy and Episcopal priesthood to describe and illustrate corporate spirituality. Dazzling Bodies should be required reading for Christian clergy and lay people. --Margaret R. Miles, Professor of Historical Theology emerita, The Graduate Theological Union, Berkeley, CA I have been waiting for a book like this for the nearly three decades I have been in parish ministry. All the usual books on congregational dynamics seem to separate lSC