It is now generally accepted that the structure and function of the human body deeply influence the nature of human thought. As a consequence, our religious experiences are at least partially determined by our sensory organs, emotional programs, sexual sensibilities, and the neural framework of our brains.
In Spirituality in the Flesh, Robert C. Fuller investigates how studying the body can help us to answer the profoundest spiritual questions. Why is it that some religious traditions assign spiritual currency to pain? How do neurochemically driven emotions, such as fear, shape our religious actions? What is the relationship between chemically altered states of consciousness and religious innovation? Using recent biological research to illuminate religious beliefs and practices, Fuller delves into topics as diverse as apocalypticism, nature religion, Native American peyotism, and the sexual experimentalism of nineteenth-century communal societies, in every case seeking middle ground between the arguments currently emanating from scientists and humanists. He takes most scientific interpreters to task for failing to understand the inherently cultural aspects of embodied experience even as he chides most religion scholars for ignoring new knowledge about the biological substrates of human thought and behavior.
Comfortable with the language of scientific analysis and sympathetic to the inherently subjective aspects of religious events, Fuller introduces the biological study of religion by joining together this era's unprecedented understanding of bodily states with an expert's knowledge of religious phenomena. Culling together insights from scientific observations, historical allusions, and literary references, Spirituality in the Flesh offers a bold look at the biological underpinnings of religion and opens up new and exciting agendas for understanding the nature and value of human religiosity.
Industry Reviews
"In this work of broad scholarly foundations, Robert Fuller demonstrates that an emphasis on religion's ultimate grounding in human embodiment -- in our genetic dispositions, the electro-chemical activity of our brains, our sexual impulses, and our experience of the body in sickness and health -- need not reduce human piety to a meaningless or merely functional by-product of human evolution. To the contrary, this fundamental principle provides Fuller with a
context in which to explore in depth the richness of religious traditions and spiritual practices as they have been formed by bodily dispositions and as they shape our experiences of the world and
ourselves in turn." --David Wulff, Professor of Psychology, Wheaton College, author of Psychology of Religion: Classic and Contemporary
"Writing against both the debilitating relativisms of the humanities and the gross reductionisms of the natural sciences, Robert C. Fuller offers us here a third method or path through that one indisputable universal of all human culture and religion -- the human body. And this is a real body, not simply another "cultural image." This is lived flesh, combinative DNA, fearful and wondrous emotion, chemically catalyzed vision, pounding sex, ecstatic orgasm,
excruciating pain, the natural environment in crisis, nature at its most intimate, a multi-billion-year evolved universe becoming conscious in, well, us. The possibilities for new thought and new theory
seem literally endless here, "in the flesh." --Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion
"This is a detailed yet fast-moving exploration of what science can, and cannot, tell us about the role of biology in spirituality. Ironically, even as Americans are becoming increasingly religious, scientists are discovering more and more about the brain systems and genes that underlie our beliefs. The strength of this book is that it will be equally appealing to devout believers and atheists alike." --Dean Hamer, molecular biologist and author of The God
Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Gene
"Writing against both the debilitating relativisms of the humanities and the gross reductionisms of the natural sciences, Robert C. Fuller offers us here a third method or path through that one indisputable universal of all human culture and religion -- the human body. And this is a real body, not simply another "cultural image." This is lived flesh, combinative DNA, fearful and wondrous emotion, chemically catalyzed vision, pounding sex, ecstatic orgasm,
excruciating pain, the natural environment in crisis, nature at its most intimate, a multi-billion-year evolved universe becoming conscious in, well, us. The possibilities for new thought and new theory
seem literally endless here, "in the flesh." --Jeffrey J. Kripal, author of The Serpent's Gift: Gnostic Reflections on the Study of Religion
"This is a detailed yet fast-moving exploration of what science can, and cannot, tell us about the role of biology in spirituality. Ironically, even as Americans are becoming increasingly religious, scientists are discovering more and more about the brain systems and genes that underlie our beliefs. The strength of this book is that it will be equally appealing to devout believers and atheists alike." --Dean Hamer, molecular biologist and author of The God
Gene: How Faith Is Hardwired into Our Genes
