Our Bodies Are Selves

Our Bodies Are Selves is a look at what it means to be human in a world where medical technology and emerging ethical insight force us to rethink the boundaries of humanity/spirit and man/machine. This book gives us a fresh look at how our expanding biological views of ourselves and our shared evolutionary history shows us a picture that may not always illumine who and where we are as Christians. Offering up Christian theological views of embodiment, the authors give everyday examples of lives of love, faith, and bodily realities that offer the potential to create new definitions of what it means to be a faith community in an increasingly technological age of medicine.

""In Our Bodies Are Selves, I found a compendium of perspectives reflecting upon the longing to find ourselves again at home in our bodies--to challenge the commonly held 'assumption that body and self are two separate things,' and to locate body-selves again within Christian theological tradition.""
--Anne Benvenuti, author of Spirit Unleashed: Reimagining Human-Animal Relations

""In one way or another, most of us work to figure out life. Meaning is complex and often elusive. We are especially challenged when facing the uncertainties of personal illness and decline. This text helps show us the way. A new paradigm, ""bodyself,"" forcefully challenges the old mind-body dualism of the venerable Descartes and some now antiquated views of medical practice. Hefner and Pederson's perspective . . . is compelling, with a reasoned approach that draws the reader in.""
--Jerome W. Freeman, John C. Sall, MD, Professor in Medicine, Sanford School of Medicine


Philip Hefner is Professor of Systematic Theology Emeritus, Lutheran School of Theology at Chicago. He was Editor of Zygon: Journal of Religion and Science, 1988-2007. His Technology and Human Becoming (2003) is in widespread use as a college text.

Ann Pederson is Professor of Religion at Augustana College, Sioux Falls, SD. She is the author of The Geography of God's Incarnation (2013).

Susan Barreto is a journalist, whose work appears on the website of the Lutheran Alliance for Faith, Science and Technology (www.luthscitech.org) and The Lutheran magazine. She is also editor of InvestHedge, a monthly magazine that covers the hedge fund industry.