arts and culture on The Body

The spiritual discipline of honoring the body helps us find our way between the excesses of a culture that glorifies and objectifies the body and the excesses of Christian tradition that have often de...

A study led by Brigham Young University found that 96 percent of girls and 87 percent of boys had interacted with Disney princesses by age four. Girls who engaged the most with princess culture (via m...

Art is the representation not of the body but of the forces which created the body.

According to the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, the function of the brain was to keep the body from overheating. In The Parts of Animals, he noted that that the brain was a “compound of earth an...

They took the body down from the cross and one of the few rich men among the first Christians obtained permission to bury it in a rock tomb in his garden the Romans setting a military guard lest there...

The accumulated body of scientific knowledge can tell us all about the canvas, oils, and minerals that combine to make a work of art, but they cannot tell us why it takes our breath away.

The Christian life depends the single personality from the collective, not by isolating him but by giving him the status of an organ in the mystical body.

In recent decades, many Christians have tried to make sense of the tension between our bodies and spirits by swinging to the opposite pole. Instead of saying, “The body doesn’t matter,” they have said...

To call the community in Corinth “the body of Christ” that proclaims Jesus as Lord, then, counters a culture that proclaims that Caesar is lord, where Caesar is seen as ruler and head of the body. Onc...

Christianity is without doubt the earthiest of all religions. Unlike most other religions, it doesn’t call you out of the physical, out of the body, or out of the world. Rather it tells you that God e...

My wife was grading a science test at home that she had given to her elementary-school class and was reading some of the results to me. The subject was “The Human Body,” and the first question was: “N...

Leader: Arise! Shine! Christ’s Church has assembled. People: We are one body, with Christ as our head. Leader: What kind of body is this? People: The Body of Christ, brought together not by huma...

The early church was strikingly different from the culture around it in this way - the pagan society was stingy with its money and promiscuous with its body. A pagan gave nobody their money and practi...

Leader: “Now there are various kinds of gifts, but the same Spirit. There are various kinds of service, and the same Lord.” People: “ For as the body is one, and has many members, and all the members...

Leader: "Behold, how good and pleasant it is when brothers and sisters dwell together in unity… for there the Lord has commanded the blessing, life forevermore." Let us worship the Lord in o...

O God, the Father of the forsaken, the help of the weak, the supplier of the needy, you have distributed and proportioned your gifts to body and soul, in such sort that all may acknowledge and perform...

The advantage that cities and traditional neighborhoods have over sprawling suburbs with respect to interdependence is that they allow people of a greater variety of ages to participate meaningfully i...

Editor’s Note: The following illustration came from one of my own sermons, as I was trying to help a congregation see itself not as a building, but the body of Christ. It has been adapted for TPW. No...

God of grace and God of glory on your people pour your power...Grant us wisdom, grant us courage for the facing of this hour. Lord—we need You...today, tomorrow and forever. We need you to heal those ...

In her excellent little book (Mythical Me), Richella Parham begins by describing a single event that led to a personal journey into addressing her struggles with comparison. Having recently moved to a...

A faith without some doubts is like a human body with no antibodies in it. People who blithely go through life too busy or indifferent to ask the hard questions about why they believe as they do will ...

Leader: Put on then, as God's chosen ones, holy and beloved, compassionate hearts, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience All: bearing with one another and, if one has a complaint against an...

Have you ever noticed that we often see ourselves, specifically our bodies, our facial features differently? In 2013 the soap company Dove decided to explore this phenomenon by hiring an FBI-trained f...

Insecurity is a funny thing. It makes us into someone we’re not as a way to cope with someone we used to be. For me, it started at home. Growing up, my dad had been critical of my mother’s weight, and...

In his excellent book, Strong & Weak , Andy Crouch discusses the unique phenomenon of nakedness, something, as he will argue, no other species really experiences. “Nakedness” has, for good reas...

The story goes like this: It’s the height of British colonialism. An English traveler lands in Africa, intent on a rapid journey into the jungle. He charters some local porters to carry his supplies. ...

You can never be too rich or too thin. (for contrast).

A large nose is in fact the sign of an affable man, good, courteous, witty, liberal, courageous, such as I am.

There is no such thing as an independent Christian.

Retail therapy gives us the thrill of the hunt and a hit of dopamine (the love hormone) as we anticipate a purchase, but it cannot feed our hungers. We know this. But we return each time, hoping it wi...