Graceful Bodies

Today we again met in C Robbins Cark Library of Saint Mark’s Episcopal Church in Berkeley, this time to discuss the fates of Mary’s and her divine Son’s bodies. Working with the research of Caroline Walker Bynum, Donna Spivey Ellington, Margaret Miles, Peter Widdicombe, and Mikhail Bakhtin, we explored the fates of the bodies of the Holy Mother and her divine Son. Commodification of the flesh brought Christians to question the value of divine materiality. Human error prevented the reproduction of the full discussion online. (Apologies.) Next week we will be taking up texts from Martin Luther, Jacob Spener, John Locke, and Francis Bacon, showing how the retreat of value from surface forms of appearance made human bodies and creation vulnerable to commodified depredations. Christians became the authorized and authorizing bearers of a gospel hostile to human flesh and to creation as a whole. Join us at https://newconsensus.org/marx-marks.html.