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.




The Body Divine


Book Description

The book makes an significant contribution to comparative theology, and explores the wide-ranging implications of a religious symbol whose potency is perennial, cross-cultural, and of continuing contemporary importance.




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.




Our Bodies Tell God's Story


Book Description

In response to a world awash in sexual chaos and gender confusion, this book offers a bold and thoroughly biblical look at the meaning of the body, sex, gender, and marriage. Bestselling author, cultural commentator, and popular theologian Christopher West is one of the world's most recognized teachers of John Paul II's Theology of the Body. He specializes in making this teaching accessible to all Christians, with particular attention to evangelicals. As West explains, from beginning to end the Bible tells a story of marriage. It begins with the marriage of man and woman in an earthly paradise and ends with the marriage of Christ and the church in an eternal paradise. In our post-sexual-revolution world, we need to remember that our bodies tell a divine story and proclaim the gospel itself. As male and female and in the call to become "one flesh," our bodies reveal a "great mystery" that mirrors Christ's love for the church (Eph. 5:31-32). This book provides a redemptive rather than repressive approach to sexual purity, explores the true meaning of sex and marriage, and offers a compelling vision of what it means to be created male and female. Foreword by Eric Metaxas.




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.




Living in a Body on a Planet


Book Description

In this book, William shares in his own uniqued way the clarity, simplicity and guidance that will set you free to allow your life to become more expressive, enjoyable and inclusive and for you to exclusively run forth with what is in your life and what is coming forth into your life from all around you on a planet within the Universe and so much more. This book will assist you to access your natural birthrights and use the divine abilities that have been awaiting you. By allowing yourself to walk through these simple steps, you will be reclaiming your life, your health and your world. Relationships, finances and parenting etc. will all begin to grow and evolve. As you find yourself reconnecting with your source, optimum health and well-being, happiness and success and much, much more will be yours. It will forever change the way you look at your life and live your life and as Will so powerfully reveals in these pages, we all have these divine abilities and this work will assist you and guide you to living them and having a blast as you flourish on every level of your being. Chapters and topics in this book include: Introduction Will's Journey Where Did We Come From? Details on the karmic grid system, why it was so strong, what its purpose was and when it was dissolved. Clarity on the mind, the ego, emotion and judgement and why they have had so much power over you. Where Are We Going? Who or what is God? Clarity and guidance on the God/Creator this book refers to, your God/Creator given innate abilities, living beyond the mind level, ego, conflict etc., playing with your innate abilities and experiencing your uniquedness. What Is a True Relationship, and How Can You Have One? Living in a world with out pretense nor repetitive behaviors that do not complement your life. Questioning the mind is a starting point to create on opening to reveal the truth and using the mind as your friend. Rebuilding Your DNA and Raising Your Vibratory Structures Details on letting the body become your friend and letting the body be the body. How emotions and beliefs impact the body and its cells and its vibratory levels and cause rapid aging. How you can regenerate, rebuild and change the body. Playing with Higher States of Consciousness and Your Guidance Realms This book with guide you into your ability to play with higher states of consciousness, communicate directly with your source, what it is to be your presence and the Higher You where you are completely resolved of carrying any emotional baggage and are free from being hijacked by judgment and conflict with yourself and others. We will call your Higher Levels your 'internal/eternal guidance'. Communicating with Angelic and Archangelic Presences and Ascended Host Realms This chapter is about consciously enjoying the assistance and love from Angelic, Archangelic and Ascended Host Realms, we will call these Realms are you 'external guidance'. You can think of these Realms as protectors, advisors and even cheerleaders that encourage, assist and support you. Communicating with All of the Kingdoms You will see that when you are playing with all of your abilities and communicating with All of the Kingdoms, your mind and its evaluations and judgements are out of the way and you will have a greater understanding and knowledge of all things. Living in a Clear State This is your "I Am" presence of neutrality, openness, fluidity, freedom and expression. This is your natural state, one of an "is-ness" and simplicity and clarity within every level of your being. This is the 'real You' living in total bliss and being in the world and not embodying the world and its outside activities and dilemmas. Additionally, with-in each chapter there is a Willcasso and a meditation, or you may call it an exercise, to assist you in embodying all of your gifts and abilities through your mental and physical embodiment.




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.




A Body of Divinity


Book Description

Thomas Watson's Body of Practical Divinity is one of the most precious of the peerless works of the Puritans; and those best acquainted with it, prize it most. Watson was one of the most concise, racy, illustrative, and suggestive of those eminent divines who made the Puritan age the Augustan period of evangelical literature. There is a happy union of sound doctrine, heart-searching experience and practical wisdom throughout all his works; and his Body of Divinity is, beyond all the rest, useful to the student and the minister. He explains the Doctrines of God, Divine Sovereignty, Salvation, Sin, and the Trinity with remarkable clarity. His thinking is sound and Scriptural. Puritan theology sets the diadem of our salvation on Christ, and Christ alone, and it is solely on the basis of his meritorious work that we are saved.




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.




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.