Reflections on Body Theology

Bodies matter. They shape how we experience life—through our senses, movements, and our interactions with the world. Yet, our bodies are frequently sites of inequality and violence. In 2025, state-sanctioned war and genocide (in Palestine and Ukraine to name just two places) targets and seeks to erase the bodies of entire communities, both physically and culturally. The COVID-19 pandemic has left lasting physical, mental, and societal scars, with millions facing health challenges like long COVID, deepening inequalities, and strained healthcare systems. Physical and sexual violence, especially gender-based violence, remains a global public health crisis. The bodies of Black people, ethnic minorities, immigrants, and refugees are still treated as though they are disposable. In the UK, where I am writing, a recent Supreme Court ruling has highlighted efforts to control certain bodies, especially those of trans and intersex people.

In an environment rife with hostility toward bodies, theology has often struggled to address the physicality of human existence. Historically, particularly in Christian thought, bodies have been viewed as unruly and problematic, separate from the mind, and diminished as “sinful” in a post-Fall world. Augustine, for example, wrote about how the Fall disrupted the harmony between soul and body, leaving the body’s desires prone to disorder. Thankfully, recent theological work has started to reconsider these narratives, seeking to affirm the importance of embodied existence and challenge longstanding divides between the physical and the spiritual. This evolving dialogue invites a deeper reflection on how theology might engage with the dignity and vulnerability of human bodies.

I am glad that Practical Theology Hub is a place where this kind of work is being hosted in new and creative ways. If you’re looking to read more about body theology, I’d recommend starting with Temitope Labinjo’s piece on her lived experience of endometriosis. It’s a significant contribution to conversations around chronic pain. She describes the physical, emotional, and social toll this can take, and considers the particular experience of women in low and middle-income countries such as Nigeria, where limited resources and cultural stigma can result in long delays in treatment and diagnosis. Labinjo begins to explore a more holistic approach that integrates medical care (evidence-based therapies and interventions) with spirituality (and the emotional and spiritual support of faith communities).

The experience of purity culture can have similar embodied effects. Purity culture includes (but is not limited to) the restriction of all sexual activity to heterosexual marriage, an emphasis on modesty and sexual purity, and abstinence-only education. Iona Curtius explores this in her piece on the use of purity metaphors. She underscores the power of metaphorical language and the use of teaching illustrations, such as the tearing up of paper hearts, to demonstrate the loss of “value” that occurs with premarital sex. While this teaching, commonly associated with conservative evangelical movements in the US and UK, is experienced by people of all genders, it is most commonly targeted at young women and girls. Curtius connects the language of purity culture and its metaphors with  the real effects it has on people’s bodies.

Similar conflicts around theology and bodies are brought to life in Ivone Gebara’s words (translated from the original Portuguese by our editor Patricia Palazzo Tsai). Gebara writes about the realities of abortion bans in Brazil, which have impacted the bodies of pregnant people in increasingly dangerous ways. The lack of access to legal terminations has led to a rise in unregulated abortions and untimely deaths.The story of Mocinha, a 13 year old raped by her stepfather, who was not allowed to legally terminate her pregnancy, is devastating. A lack of belief in lived, bodily experience is a common theme both here and in Labinjo’s previously mentioned piece. Gebara reminds readers that these issues cannot be abstracted. She writes strikingly of the ways that abortion bans are commonly upheld due to a deep fear of women’s bodies embedded in Christianity, “justified by a masculine abstraction of God, confirmed by a personalist Christological dogmatism that excludes women from real representation.” Ultimately, the church and law-makers “fear that Eve’s many bodies may threaten their unstable security.”

A final reflection I’d recommend for those looking to explore body theology is written by Bachelard Kaze Yemtsa, who reflects on the paradox of performing a discipleship “dance” during ongoing suffering and trauma. Like Curtius, Yemtsa explores the metaphorical, in this case the image of “dancing” as a relationship with God. While he questions whether this metaphor is appropriate in a pastoral context for those dealing with trauma, he later describes how the communal and physical practice of dancing can help to express suffering in ways that words alone cannot. Yemtsa’s emphasis on cross-cultural creativity and imagination invites us to look in new ways at how trauma is both held and released by the body.

Each of the posts I’ve mentioned is available to read on Practical Theology Hub. I hope that they generate more conversation across different cultures and religious perspectives about the importance of the body in our theological thinking. If you’re interested in writing something for us that explores these issues, we’d be delighted to read your thoughts! You can find our submission guidelines at this link.

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© Katie Cross, 2025.

This work is licensed under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).