Divine Bodies


Book Description

A path-breaking scholar's insightful reexamination of the resurrection of the body and the construction of the self When people talk about the resurrection they often assume that the bodies in the afterlife will be perfect. But which version of our bodies gets resurrected--young or old, healthy or sick, real-to-life or idealized? What bodily qualities must be recast in heaven for a body to qualify as both ours and heavenly? The resurrection is one of the foundational statements of Christian theology, but when it comes to the New Testament only a handful of passages helps us answer the question "What will those bodies be like?" More problematically, the selection and interpretation of these texts are grounded in assumptions about the kinds of earthly bodies that are most desirable. Drawing upon previously unexplored evidence in ancient medicine, philosophy, and culture, this illuminating book both revisits central texts--such as the resurrection of Jesus--and mines virtually ignored passages in the Gospels to show how the resurrection of the body addresses larger questions about identity and the self.




God's Body


Book Description

God is unbounded. God became flesh. While these two assertions are equally viable parts of Western Christian religious heritage, they stand in tension with one another. Fearful of reducing God's majesty with shallow anthropomorphisms, philosophy and religion affirm that God, as an eternal being, stands wholly apart from creation. Yet the legacy of the incarnation complicates this view of the incorporeal divine, affirming a very different image of God in physical embodiment. While for many today the idea of an embodied God seems simplistic--even pedestrian--Christoph Markschies reveals that in antiquity, the educated and uneducated alike subscribed to this very idea. More surprisingly, the idea that God had a body was held by both polytheists and monotheists. Platonic misgivings about divine corporeality entered the church early on, but it was only with the advent of medieval scholasticism that the idea that God has a body became scandalous, an idea still lingering today. In God's Body Markschies traces the shape of the divine form in late antiquity. This exploration follows the development of ideas of God's corporeality in Jewish and Greco-Roman traditions. In antiquity, gods were often like humans, which proved to be important for philosophical reflection and for worship. Markschies considers how a cultic environment nurtured, and transformed, Jewish and Christian descriptions of the divine, as well as how philosophical debates over the connection of body and soul in humanity provided a conceptual framework for imagining God. Markschies probes the connections between this lively culture of religious practice and philosophical speculation and the christological formulations of the church to discover how the dichotomy of an incarnate God and a fleshless God came to be. By studying the religious and cultural past, Markschies reveals a Jewish and Christian heritage alien to modern sensibilities, as well as a God who is less alien to the human experience than much of Western thought has imagined. Since the almighty God who made all creation has also lived in that creation, the biblical idea of humankind as image of God should be taken seriously and not restricted to the conceptual world but rather applied to the whole person.




The Divine Body


Book Description

Life after death continues and is real.Prophet Moses received a message from God.The colors purple, red, dark red are the colors of the flowers in Paradise, and these three colors symbolize the sacred garments of the priests.Prophet Muhamed accepts divine messages when the body takes two forms. When the body took on a spiritual form and an organic body.




The Divine Body


Book Description




A Divine Life In A Divine Body


Book Description

This book contains many discourses by the author, renamed Navajata by the Mother, on the sadhana of Sri Aurobindo's Integral Yoga: how can we make our life more perfect; what is the highest an individual can do; how can the whole world be happy, how can yoga be practised at each moment of one's life; can destiny be changed, can death be conquered – how can one attain a divine life in a divine body.




God in Your Body


Book Description

Your body is the place where heaven and earth meet. The greatest spiritual achievement is not transcending the body but joining body and spirit together. But to do this, you must break through assumptions that draw boundaries around the Infinite and wake up to the body as the site of holiness itself. This groundbreaking book is the first comprehensive treatment of the body in Jewish spiritual practice and an essential guide to the sacred. With meditation practices, physical exercises, visualizations, and sacred text, you will learn how to experience the presence of the Divine in, and through, your body. And by cultivating an embodied spiritual practice, you will transform everyday activities—eating, walking, breathing, washing—into moments of deep spiritual realization, uniting sacred and sensual, mystical and mundane.




Divine Healing Of The Body


Book Description

Divine Healing of the Body covers the history of healing through the centuries as well as how divine healing is present today through the Atonement, and how we experience divine healing today.




Scripting the Life You Want


Book Description

A step-by-step guide to the process of “scripting” your future and successfully manifesting what you want in life • Explores the science behind how the scripting method works and shares the vivid journal entries from the author’s big breakthrough--when he successfully used his method to land a lead role on a TV show • Details how the understanding of incredible new (and, until now, mostly unheard of) scientific discoveries and emerging technologies is the most important key to creating and manifesting in your life • Reveals fun, easy tools for manifesting and self-help, updated for a new generation In this step-by-step guide, filled with success stories and practical exercises, Royce Christyn details a simple “scripting” process for harnessing the Law of Attraction and manifesting what you want in your life--happiness, wealth, travel, love, health, the perfect career, or simply a productive day. The process is backed by science and experience, yet it feels like magic. And all you need is a pen and paper. Inspired by New Thought and Positive Thinking classics, Christyn explains how he developed his scripting method through 4 years of trial and error, keeping what worked and dropping what didn’t until he brought his success rate from 5% to nearly 100%. Sharing pages from his own journals, he outlines how to create the life you want with daily journaling exercises, beginning with a simple list-making practice to figure out your wants and intentions and then progressing to actual scripting of your future, whether the next 12 hours or the next 10 days. He shows how, over time, your scripts will increase in accuracy until they converge with reality. He shares the vivid entries from his big breakthrough--when he successfully used his method to land a lead guest-starring role on Disney Channel’s Wizards of Waverly Place with Selena Gomez. He explores how “feeling” your future success as you write your daily scripts helps attract your desired outcomes, and he shares the key phrases to include to make your script come true. The author also explores the science behind how the scripting method works, including a down-to-earth examination of quantum mechanics. From small dreams to lifelong goals, this book gives you the tools to put your thoughts into action and finally close the gap between where you are and where you want to be in your life.




Bhakti and Embodiment


Book Description

The historical shift from Vedic traditions to post-Vedic bhakti (devotional) traditions is accompanied by a shift from abstract, translocal notions of divinity to particularized, localized notions of divinity and a corresponding shift from aniconic to iconic traditions and from temporary sacrificial arenas to established temple sites. In Bhakti and Embodiment Barbara Holdrege argues that the various transformations that characterize this historical shift are a direct consequence of newly emerging discourses of the body in bhakti traditions in which constructions of divine embodiment proliferate, celebrating the notion that a deity, while remaining translocal, can appear in manifold corporeal forms in different times and different localities on different planes of existence. Holdrege suggests that an exploration of the connections between bhakti and embodiment is critical not only to illuminating the distinctive transformations that characterize the emergence of bhakti traditions but also to understanding the myriad forms that bhakti has historically assumed up to the present time. This study is concerned more specifically with the multileveled models of embodiment and systems of bodily practices through which divine bodies and devotional bodies are fashioned in Krsna bhakti traditions and focuses in particular on two case studies: the Bhagavata Purana, the consummate textual monument to Vaisnava bhakti, which expresses a distinctive form of passionate and ecstatic bhakti that is distinguished by its embodied nature; and the Gaudiya Vaisnava tradition, an important bhakti tradition inspired by the Bengali leader Caitanya in the sixteenth century, which articulates a robust discourse of embodiment pertaining to the divine bodies of Krsna and the devotional bodies of Krsna bhaktas that is grounded in the canonical authority of the Bhagavata Purana.




People of the Body


Book Description

By shifting attention from the image of Jews as a textual community to the ways Jews understand and manage their bodies — for example, to their concerns with reproduction and sexuality, menstruation and childbirth— this volume contributes to a revisioning of what Jews and Judaism are and have been. The project of re-membering the Jewish body has both historical and constructive motivations. As a constructive project, this book describes, renews, and participates in the complex and ongoing modern discussion about the nature of Jewish bodies and the place of bodies in Judaism.