Dazzling Bodies: Rethinking Spirituality and Community Formation

Spirituality is always developed and nurtured in community, and communities have particular spiritualities. Dazzling Bodies promotes practices and performances as the basis for individual and community spiritual formation by analyzing specific experiences and real-life situations in personal and corporate life. Three bodies are delineated as the basis for spiritual formation: the physical body, the social body, and the corporate body. Drawing on theories of communication (semiotics, social semiotics, and narrative theory), the book examines personal and corporate spiritual formation, both by plotting the ways community systems create solidarity, and by analyzing community systems for the modulation of power at work. Dazzling Bodies explores the development of a specific language system for each community, taking the sermon as the primary instrument of community formation. Liturgy and worship receive special attention. A theory of asceticism, based on specific performances, founded in renewed social relationships, and forming an alternative symbolic universe, provides parameters for individual and corporate spiritual formation.

Richard Valantasis is codirector of the Institute for Contemplative Living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Among his books are The Beliefnet Guide to Gnosticism and Other Vanished Christianities (2006), The Making of the Self (Cascade Books, 2008), and The Gospels and Christian Life in History and Practice (2009).