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alexdpar 's review for:
God: An Anatomy
by Francesca Stavrakopoulou
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
Thanks to Waterstones I was able to get this book and bring it back to the U.S. a couple months before it came out here.
The author was not wrong, they had written a dense and informative textbook that I wish I had while I was in undergrad. But now, I see it as a perfect resource for my graduate programs.
This is one of the first books where I could feel how delicately each word was selected for every sentence, as if every individual word had the weight of the entire theological understanding of God’s anatomy depending on it. It was one of those books where you found yourself rereading every sentence and paragraph because your fundamental comprehension of the physicality of God is shocked to the core. The epilogue sums it up best, our understanding of the modern body of God has detoured so much from what is in the texts and images of the past, and you feel almost misguided. Everything from the power of God’s feet to the life-giving breath of air, the symbolic use of thrones and theological importance of smell all come to represent something so much bigger, more powerful, and surprisingly human. And yet it feels so ignored today.
My only hesitancy with this book was the key take away points. It wasn’t until the very last few paragraphs of it all did I feel like the author hit away the main argument. Throughout I kept asking, “so what?” While the author packs the book - to the brim - of important, relevant, and previously eluded information, I felt as if there needed to be more time or additional pages reflecting on what this means for theology today, especially within the Judaic and Christian traditions. But, just maybe, that’s for the reader to figure out.
The author was not wrong, they had written a dense and informative textbook that I wish I had while I was in undergrad. But now, I see it as a perfect resource for my graduate programs.
This is one of the first books where I could feel how delicately each word was selected for every sentence, as if every individual word had the weight of the entire theological understanding of God’s anatomy depending on it. It was one of those books where you found yourself rereading every sentence and paragraph because your fundamental comprehension of the physicality of God is shocked to the core. The epilogue sums it up best, our understanding of the modern body of God has detoured so much from what is in the texts and images of the past, and you feel almost misguided. Everything from the power of God’s feet to the life-giving breath of air, the symbolic use of thrones and theological importance of smell all come to represent something so much bigger, more powerful, and surprisingly human. And yet it feels so ignored today.
My only hesitancy with this book was the key take away points. It wasn’t until the very last few paragraphs of it all did I feel like the author hit away the main argument. Throughout I kept asking, “so what?” While the author packs the book - to the brim - of important, relevant, and previously eluded information, I felt as if there needed to be more time or additional pages reflecting on what this means for theology today, especially within the Judaic and Christian traditions. But, just maybe, that’s for the reader to figure out.