So Worth It: Bodies

Over the weekend, we dropped our second episode of season 3, following our previous episode on racism.

As Dan and I indicated in our discussion, the second episode is not unconnected to the first, though our focus was to dig a bit deeper into the less obvious conceptions of embodiment, precisely because they have a massive capacity in shaping our more obvious conceptions of the body.

The central point in our episode was that embodiment is not a side effect, but the very medium through which God meets us. The body is a big part of our identity. It also provides a stability and foundation of trust. This is particularly the case with the face, which becomes the material foundation for making primal memories. They cut across labels that you can slap onto whole groups of people. In other words, bodies are the foundation for our uniqueness as persons.

There were other senses of embodiment, which you can glean from expressions like “Body of Work” or “body politic”, the “body of Christ”. None of these relate to literal physical embodiment. These social and cultural modes of embodiment, which in turn embed the metaphors of the body. These are social and cultural (and thus linguistic and symbolic) conceptions of the body that in turn are also embedded in communities that sustain that meaning. Bodies are therefore never isolated from these foundations of sociality. More relevant for the life of faith, these social and cultural embodiments are also constitutive of the Church.

Also, while these social and cultural embodiments do not manifest a physical body, but they do help us understand the physical body. For instance, the naming of bodies is a product of language and culture, rather than the physical body, but they help us make sense of the physical body before us.

What this indicates is that there must be something that transcends the physical that gives the body meaning. As Daniel said in the episode, this ultimately makes the body a sign. The human body is not a biological fact, it is ontologically designed to communicate our identity and purpose. The body is automatically oriented towards the transcendent, and from that, the relational and the dialogical.

Against this backdrop, we touched upon the key importance of relation, as we pointed out in our episode on mission back in season 2. Bodies that are meaningful are never in isolation, which cuts across our tendency to think that bodies can be conceived as isolated, purely physical entities. In this context, we raised Prof. Jeffrey Bishop’s excellent The Anticipatory Corpse, which looked at the history of the body that is considered epistemologically normative in medicine today, namely the isolated dead body in a clinical space.

Ultimately, we say that the body is loaded with moral heft the moment we conceive of those bodies. However we conceive of bodies, we are making moral judgements and affording some kind of value or worth the moment we conceive of them. In this context, we looked at dichotomy of actual and potential worth of bodies, which was covered in part of my book A Theological Engagement with Pornography.

So Worth It can be listened to in full on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music.