Radical Embodiment

A theological exploration of human nature engaging with modernist and postmodernist thought, and emphasising the reality and significance of our physical being.

Radical embodiment' refers to an epistemology and anthropology fundamentally rooted in our bodies as always in correlation with our natural and social environments. All human rationality, meaning, and value arise not only instrumentally but also substantively from this embodiment in the world. Radical embodiment reacts against Enlightenment mind-body dualism, as well as its monistic offshoots, including the physicalism that reduces everything to component matter/energy at the expense of subjectivity and meaning. It also rejects certain forms of postmodernism that reinscribe modern dualisms. David H. Nikkel develops and explores this perspective of 'radical embodiment' by examining varieties of modern and postmodern theology, and the nature and role of tradition - in terms of linguistic and non-linguistic experience, the religion and science dialogue on the nature of consciousness, and the immanent and transcendent aspects of God.

David H. Nikkel is Associate Professor of Religion at the University of North Carolina at Pembroke. He is the author of Panentheism in Hartshorne and Tillich: A Creative Synthesis (1995).