Description: Education is about learning to think. Much of what we
call thinking, however, is a hodge-podge of repetitious self-talk,
opinion, and cutting and pasting of second-hand ideas. Moreover,
thinking in the present has often been alien to scholars who were
tempted to think abstractly. But life and thought belong together
and require each other, as Plotinus pointed out many centuries ago:
"" T]he object of contemplation is living and life, and the two
together are one"" (Ennead 3.8.8). Presently, many women and men in
the academic world are thinking concretely within the context of
their own lives and with acknowledged accountability to broader
communities with whom they think and to whom they are answerable.
The essays in this volume consider Christianity as an aspect of
North American culture, bringing the critical tools of the academy
to thinking about some of the perplexing and pressing problems of
contemporary public life. Three interactive and interdependent
themes traverse these essays: gender, the effects of media culture,
and institutions. Each of these themes has been central to Margaret
Miles's work for thirty years. Each understands corporeality as
fundamental both to subjectivity and society. Miles finds that
Christianity, critically appropriated, provides ideas and methods
for thinking concretely about life in North American society.
Endorsements: Through her prolific career Margaret Miles has
focused her scholarly sensibilities on the history of Christianity
in conjunction with real and abiding social concerns. Not least of
these are the problems and promises of gender relations. In this
collection of essays, she turns her critical gaze upon food and
film, media and mythology, delight and desire, as she examines the
verbal and visual dimensions that comprise institutional, personal,
communal, and artistic bodies. Miles mines the history of
Christianity for ways to overcome our contemporary dis-ease with
bodies. Incisively descriptive, Miles nonetheless remains unafraid
to write prescriptions. --S. Brent Plate, author of Blasphemy: Art
that Offends and Religion and Film: Cinema and the Re-Creation of
the World This collection of essays, written over two decades,
displays Margaret Miles's remarkable breadth as a theologian,
administrator, and cultural critic. With equal adeptness, she
brings ancient theological insights to bear on contemporary culture
and sheds critical, historical light on Christianity. The essays
are written with elegance, humor, and acuity, and their subject
matter offers something for almost everyone--from film to
sexuality, asceticism to pleasure, philosophical reflection to
institutional strategy. But they are unified by a single quest--for
embodied, passionate life in all its fullness. Following that
pilgrimage through these essays, one cannot help but breathe and
think more deeply. --Kathleen Sands, Associate Professor and
Director of Religious Studies at the University of Massachusetts,
Boston About the Contributor(s): Margaret R. Miles is Emerita
Professor of Historical Theology, the Graduate Theological Union,
Berkeley. She was Bussey Professor of Theology at the Harvard
University Divinity School until 1996, when she became Dean and
Academic Vice President of the Graduate Theological Union. Her
books include A Complex Delight: The Secularization of the Breast,
1350-1750 (2008), Rereading Historical Theology: Before, During,
and After Augustine (2008), The Word Made Flesh: A History of
Christian Thought (2005), and Plotinus on Body and Beauty (1999).
General
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