The Embodied Eye: Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling [Paperback]

David Morgan builds on his previous groundbreaking work to offer this new, systematically integrated theory of the study of religion as visual culture. Providing key tools for scholars across disciplines studying the materiality of religions, Morgan gives an accessibly written theoretical overview including case studies of the ways seeing is related to touching, hearing, feeling, and such ephemeral experiences as dreams, imagination, and visions. The case studies explore both the high and low of religious visual culture: Catholic traditions of the erotic Sacred Heart of Jesus, the unrecognizability of the Virgin in the Fatima apparitions, the prehistory of Warner Sallmans face of Jesus, and more. Basing the study of religious images and visual practices in the relationship between seeing and the senses, Morgan argues against reductionist models of the gaze, demonstrating that vision is not something that occurs in abstraction, but is a fundamental way of embodying the human self.

David Morganis Professor of Religion at Duke University. He is the author of several books, includingThe Sacred Gaze: Religious Visual Culture in Theory and PracticeandVisual Piety(both from UC Press).

List of Illustrations
Preface
Acknowledgments

Part One. Cultures Two Bodies
1. Vision and Embodiment
2. The Body in Question
3. Ways of Seeing
4. Icon and Interface

Part Two. The Senses of Belief
5. The Matter of the Heart: Touching and Seeing
6. The Look of Sympathy: Feeling and Seeing
7. The Enchantment of Media: Hearing and Seeing
8. At the Cusp of Invisibility: Visions, Dreams, and Images

Notes
Select Bibliography
Index

Exploring a dazzling variety of religious imagery, David Morgan shows how vision functions as an active, physical process, embedded in bodily experience and profoundly shaped by social practilóå