Body Life

By: Maria Fee

Kenyon and I have written various times on this arts blog concerning the artist’s role towards undoing the mind-body separation evident in our society. We happen to believe that the aesthetics can mobilize and connect Christian being and doing. This is why the programming at InterArts Fellowship relies just as much on its artistic presentations as it does with its informative speakers. I often, and I admit crankily, critique along with Matthew Crawford “the view that theoretical knowledge is the only true knowledge (Crawford, Shop Class As Soulcraft, p.171). Crawford wisely perceives how our embodied experiences, especially through working with our hands, allows us to grapple with the material world that lies “outside of the self.” The knowledge gained from such exercises is anything but theoretical. Yet Christians continue to struggle with how to integrate the realities they experience daily with what they know of God.

Gesa Elsbeth Thiessen asserts how Christian anthropology has been shaped by our fear of the material, sensual, and idolatrous. Thiessen relates how this suspicion has specifically affected three areas: “the perception of the senses, the role of the body, and the view of women.” A fourth should be added—wariness towards the non-Western, the other (Thiessen, Theological Aesthetics, p.11). Our emphasis towards science, data, and the analytical gives little attention to the sensed wisdom accrued through the arts, our gender, and non-Western ways of being.

As a woman, an artist, and a Hispanic, I am a bit overly sensitive to the repercussions brought on by this overemphasis on thinking as the sole means of knowing. Our embodied reality seems to hold little significance. Yet through Christ’s incarnation we are called to love him with our entire being: strength, heart, mind, and soul. This is why I believe the artist must continually create and participate in the larger culture. In our contemporary context it is the artist who must be the theologian in order to reconcile the many schisms caused by a disembodied worldview. We have isolated the mind from the body, faith from work, and have caused disruptions between race and gender. Through Christ’s redeeming work artists are called to reevaluate and re-humanize society that we may participate in true body life.

I hope you will be able to join Jenifer Ringer, Ken Masur, Andrew Nemr, Andy Mineo, Abe Cho, John Lin, Tom Jennings and our hosts at Calvary/St George’s on Monday night as InterArts Fellowship seeks to celebrate not just our physical bodies, but the unity we possess through Christ as the body.