DESCRIPTION

Modern Western Christianity has too often seen holiness and growth in Christian character as exclusively an individual and "spiritual" (or nonphysical) matter. Centered on a suggestive proposal about "the sanctified body" by Stanley Hauerwas, the essays in this provocative volume argue contrary to that tendency, insisting that any genuine Christian holiness is vitally related to our physical and social bodies. Along the way, the essayists trace crucial confusions in ecclesiology, prayer and social action to the distorted nonbodily understanding of sanctification.