Let the Bones Dance: Embodiment and the Body of Christ

by Marcia W. Mount Shoop

Contemporary Christian faith and practice tend to address spiritual, mental, and emotional issues but ignore the body. As a result, many believers are uncomfortable in their own skins. Shoop addresses this "dis-ease" with a theology that is attentive to physical experience. She also suggests how worship services can more fully invite God to inhabit every part of a congregation -- including their flesh and blood bodies. For when individual Christian bodies are allowed to flourish, so will the unified body of Christ.

Genres: Nonfiction, Religion

208 pages, Paperback

First published September 2, 2010

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first few chapters are heavy going and reflect the book's origin in a dissertation - Mount Shoop is obliged to lay out a theoretical background for what she wants to do. The heart of the book are three central sections on rape, pregnancy and motherhood and what they can tell us about the human condition. The last few chapters, where she draws out implications for church and worship, are somehow great and frustrating at the same time. Mount Shoop is big on the poetic (rather than prosaic) quality of life, and evoking rather than reducing things to simple formulas. if you're not prepared for her to work with you like a poet (appealing to your intuition and imagination more than building a logical argument or advocating for concrete solutions) then you can safely avoid the book. but I thought she was in to something terribly profound and was willing to go wherever she led me. Ultimately, the book is about God's vision of human flourishing and pushing back against our tendencies to forget and underestimate it.

[Laura Zane · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a good discussion of how our experience becomes our biology. While it specifically deals with the trauma of rape and its particular physical and emotional wounds, it also explores motherhood as a way to understand the life giving ways which the body can be released of deep emotional wounds. It is a Christian(Presbyterian)perspective on how the church (and institutional church worship) does not offer the "space" to free people from these wounds, in fact, it sometimes adds to the repression by discounting spiritual experience in favor of an exclusively intellectual approach to faith.

[Erin Goettsch · Rating 3 out of 5]

This one took me a long time to wade through. Not in a bad way, it's just... dense. Really lovely and brilliant in places, and really dry and inaccessible in others. I'm glad I read it; I don't think that either embodied worship, nor our our physicality/bodies as they relate to faith and worship, have been talked about much (or enough), and I like her ideas about it.

(This book is very specific to female bodies in particular, which fine, but it could be affirming or exclusionary depending on the reader.)

[Emma · Rating 3 out of 5]

Skimmed, really, as research for a paper. In principle I like the emphasis on embodied faith. In this case, I found the over-use of metaphors related to pregnancy, birth, and motherhood to be excluding, which is perhaps ironic for feminist theology. Still, if those metaphors work for you, this will be a helpful book.

[Evelyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read most of this book twice for two different classes at Vanderbilt Div School. Her message resonated in different ways the second time. I loved it both times and feel it can speak to our church today about being more embodied in our worship.

[Alissa]

This is my RA from my freshman year of college.