Exploring the boundaries of bodiliness. Theological and interdisciplinary approaches to the human condition.
The 2011 congress of the "European Society of Catholic Theology" will take place in Vienna from Thursday, August 25th to Sunday, August 28th.
Any exploration of the ‘boundaries of bodiliness’ will need to consider the two main tendencies which exist within contemporary European society: on the one hand, there is the hegemony of the scientific paradigm and the danger that it may succeed in reducing a human being and humanity to merely the material. One inevitable consequence of such materialisation is that it minimises the role played by the spiritual and the religious in daily life. The body is cultivated as the defining characteristic of the individual and its decline is regarded as the end of the entire human person. The triumph over the body in the sense of transhumanist aspirations seems to want to abolish this boundary.
On the other hand, and equally as problematic, is the tendency towards an acute spiritualization of the body. Such spiritualization risks a devaluation of corporality of life which does not consider corporeal needs in its understanding of the whole human being. This too reduces the body to a mere substance of itself which the mind can avail when it sees fit. This Conference will attempt to better understand the challenges posed by these approaches in light of a theological stance which emphasises a more holistic notion of body, mind and soul.
Therefore, the papers presentedat this conference aim to investigate the way in which our society deals with corporeality and physicality in connection with a search for a theological analysis of the idea of corporeality. They will look at examples in the Bible, in history and in current theology which resist the extremes of materialisation and spiritualisation with the objective of providing fruitful suggestions that have meaning for our time. In addition, contributors will attempt to show the fundamental nature and the possibilities of this basic condition of humanity by dealing with the subject of human relations, which is essential for human corporeality. This will be done by seeking to understand the meaning of the interwovenness of body, soul and mind and the meaning of a faith in the resurrection of the body by looking at the fragility of human existence in sickness and death. Finally, presenters will try to understand in what way the corporeality of the church and the bodily performance of liturgy contribute to a modern idea of the corporeality of humanity.
