Author: Tobias Tanton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192884581
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 304

Get Book

Book Description
Appropriating insights from empirical findings and theoretical constructs of 'embodied cognition', this study explores how theological understanding is accommodated to the bodily nature of human cognition. The principle of divine accommodation provides a theological framework for considering the human cognitive capacities that are accommodated by theological concepts and ecclesial practices. A rich portrait of the nature of human cognitive capacities is drawn from an emerging paradigm in cognitive science, embodied cognition, which proposes that cognition depends upon bodily sensorimotor systems to ground concepts and to draw upon environmental resources. Embodied cognition's hypothesis that human concepts are grounded in sensorimotor states poses a theological quandary for God-concepts, since identifying God with sensorimotor content risks idolatry. The incarnation resolves this problem in theological epistemology by grounding God-concepts in bodily understanding, while avoiding idolatry. Thus, the incarnation represents an accommodation to human conceptual capacities. Embodied cognition further hypothesises that cognition relies on sensorimotor engagement with the world rather than internal mental representations. Subsequently, in addition to the brain, bodily states and environmental artefacts 'scaffold' cognitive processes. A scaffolded view of cognition highlights the cognitive import of embodied religious practices, which choregraph the body and curate material culture. Tobias Tanton applies dozens of studies identifying mechanisms by which bodily or environmental factors influence cognition to the embodied and material dimensions Christian practices. On account of their inherent cognitive effects, practices are theorised to have intrinsic 'embodied' meanings alongside 'symbolic' ones established by conventions. Consequently, liturgy is seen as a bearer of theological content rather than merely an expression of it; a locus of religious experience; and a crucial determinate of religious and ethical formation. Again, the embodied nature of Christian liturgy is understood in terms of accommodation. Embodied cognition research helpfully illuminates the details of human embodiment to which theological understanding must be accommodated.

Author: Tobias Tanton
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780191980237
Category : Cognition
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
Corporeal Theology brings theology into conversation with the area of cognitive science research known as 'embodied cognition' - which considers the way in which human thinking is shaped by the kinds of bodies we have and the way they navigate their environment - proposing that Christian religious ideas are adapted to embodied ways of thinking.

Author: Tobias Tan
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Cognition
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Get Book

Book Description

Author: Patricia Cox Miller
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812204689
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Get Book

Book Description
With few exceptions, the scholarship on religion in late antiquity has emphasized its tendencies toward transcendence, abstraction, and spirit at the expense of matter. In The Corporeal Imagination, Patricia Cox Miller argues instead that ancient Christianity took a material turn between the fourth and seventh centuries. During this period, Miller contends, there occurred a major shift in the ways in which the human being was oriented in relation to the divine, a shift that reconfigured the relationship between materiality and meaning in a positive direction. The Corporeal Imagination is a groundbreaking investigation into the theological poetics of material substance in late ancient Christian texts. From hagiographies to literary descriptions of sacred paintings to treatises on relics and theurgy, Miller examines a wide variety of ancient texts to reveal how Christian writers increasingly described the matter of the world as invested with divine power. By appealing to the reader's sensory imagination, Christian texts endowed phenomena like relics, saints' bodies in hagiography, and saints' presence in icons with a visual and tactile presence. The book draws on a variety of contemporary theoretical models to elucidate the significance of all these materials in ancient religious life and imagination.

Author: Douglas Clyde Macintosh
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Experience (Religion).
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book

Book Description

Author: Heinrich Schmid
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Lutheran Church
Languages : en
Pages : 716

Get Book

Book Description

Author: Albert Stöckl
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 464

Get Book

Book Description

Author: Michael W. Shallo
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 416

Get Book

Book Description

Author: Charles Hodge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Presbyterian Church
Languages : en
Pages : 984

Get Book

Book Description

Author: Charles Hodge
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 914

Get Book

Book Description