Maxwell Institute Podcast #168: Bodies: Limitation or Power? Featuring Rachael Johnson

Rosalynde Welch: Hello, and welcome to the Maxwell Institute Podcast where we seek out faith illuminating scholarship. I’m Rosalynde Welch, Associate Director at the Institute. This season we’re exploring The Questions We Should be Asking. Thanks for joining us. Hey, what are you doing right now? Yes, you. All you listeners out there. Are you going for a walk? Doing housework? Commuting from the office? Take a second to check in with your body. Breathing hard? Backache? Stressed out? Is your body limiting you in some way? The answer surely is yes. But, what is your body making possible right now, in this moment?

On this episode of the Maxwell Institute Podcast, I talk with Rachael Johnson, a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Maxwell Institute, and a brilliant young scholar of early modern intellectual history. Dr. Johnson studies Christian theologies of embodiment–the spiritual and religious significance of Christ’s body, and of our own bodies made in his image. Elder Jeffrey R. Holland taught powerfully that “We simply must understand the revealed, restored Latter-day Saint doctrine of the soul, and the high and inextricable part of the body plays in that doctrine.” Our bodies are the ever-present condition of our experience, so it’s easy to tune them out and ignore–or resent–their role in our spiritual life. But Dr. Johnson gave me a whole new understanding of how our bodies can connect and empower us in light of the teachings of the Restoration and the gospel of Christ.

Good morning, Rachel Johnson, and welcome to the podcast.

Rachael Johnson: It's great to be here.

Welch: Today, we are talking about bodies. As humans, we live as embodied beings. As Christians, we follow a human embodied savior. As Latter-day Saints, we worship embodied heavenly parents. So as our way into this discussion, you shared with me an article that has a really great title. I love the title, Why All the Fuss About the Body. And it was written by a scholar named Caroline Walker Bynum, who was a seminal scholar in the field of medieval history, especially during the 1980s and 1990s. You and I are both fan girls of her. Both of us read Bynum's work in graduate school. And this article that you've shared with me today is a classic article that was published in 1995. So let's set the stage a little bit for our discussion. Tell us, Rachel, when did you first read this article? Why did you love it? And has it affected your professional work since you read it?

Johnson: Yeah, I was introduced to this author and this article along with some of her other works in my second year of the PhD program I was doing in history in a class on the body in early modern Europe. And I was instantly captivated by this article. Despite the fact that it's almost 30 years old, it has a lot of timeless questions and approaches to this idea of embodiment. And so I loved it for a few reasons. One, it's just a compelling, brilliant demonstration of how much history matters. It was really reassuring for someone with a lot of trepidation about getting a PhD in history. Is this worth it? Should I be doing this? Is this relevant? And she answered unequivocally, yes. The past matters to how we understand ourselves. And how we understand ourselves now affects how we understand the past. And so it was really a great demonstration of how it works in both directions. So that as just a kind of historical exercise was really affirming and really just well done. She's a fun writer. She is not an ivory tower scholar. She brings in a lot of popular culture. She makes it just so relevant. So just as a piece of historical work, it was really fun. But in terms of the content, it really impacted me personally and professionally. On the professional level, it convinced me to do kind of a 180 in my graduate studies. I went in expecting to continue my research on Christian enlightenment debates about the nature of the soul and its relationship to gender and sex. And in this context, in the Enlightenment, the soul was a kind of contrast to the body. It was whatever was not the body. And so I was really not that interested in physical bodies. It didn't seem relevant in my understanding of the topic, which I now see as naive and needed to be developed, which her work was really influential in doing. She kind of helped me situate this characterization of the soul as something that is not embodied, that is different than the body, as itself a kind of historical evolution, a particular way of framing things that has its own genealogy. And so it helped me kind of situate that dualism, that framework I had inherited and was studying at the time kind of unreflectively, gave it a much richer context. And on a personal level, it really arrested me. I think many people experience a kind of ambivalence or discomfort with bodies. We escape into our heads. That's made very easy by our culture today and it really called me out of that kind of disembodied, you know nothing's really disembodied but I think the ways I had muted or oversimplified or mischaracterized my own embodied experience.

Welch: Yeah, I think that's right. I will catch myself just sitting down looking at my phone and it's kind of like you go into another world where you aren't paying attention to the way things feel in your body or to what's around you. You're kind of just in this world that you're absorbed in your mind and your eyes and sometimes your ears. And it really is a sort of disembodied experience and you'll sort of come to and think, oh yeah, I'm sitting here, I'm in this room and actually I'm a person in this context. you have to kind of return to it. So I agree with everything that you said. I love how plain spoken Bynum is as a scholar. She wants to communicate with everybody. It feels like not just other scholars. And so she writes very plainly, even though her research can be quite esoteric in certain ways. And she draws from popular culture. She really wants to make what she writes relevant. Another thing that really struck me about this article is that she wrote it for a friend and she narrates that in the article itself. A lot of times scholars, you know, we're casting around what can I publish next and what's going to get me tenure and then we kind of write in this sort of view from nowhere, magisterial type voice. Not at all the case in this article. She explains the origin of this idea and she tells us who and why she was writing to. She was writing for a friend who was also a professor who was about to teach a seminar to graduate students on embodiment. During the 80s and 90s there had been a real flowering of attention to this idea of the body in quotation marks, right, the body. But Bynum was left unsatisfied by a lot of that scholarship because in the end, it actually seems to be more about language and about minds than about bodies. And it kind of seemed to ignore the body and all of its fleshiness, right? So she's writing this in some ways as a corrective. to that overly language focused approach to the idea of the body. So, and it's a complex and really interesting article in some ways, but what do you think is the most important point that she wants a reader to take away from it?

Johnson: Yeah, if I were to distill it down, I think she really wants to convey the paradoxical, the inherent paradoxical nature of the body. It is something that is, but that is quality will necessarily change by virtue of its materiality. And she really explores this paradoxical quality of embodiment in a way that is so fruitful and inexhaustible. And I think rescues postmodern discourse about the body from just kind of dissolving into, like you said, this language, this discourse, but without collapsing all of the multiple registers of embodiment into just fleshliness because it does have metaphorical qualities. It does have just so many registers. And so I think she's trying to convey the paradoxical nature of embodiment and how attuned medieval theology and thought was to that paradoxical nature of embodiment and how seriously they took it, how much they attended to it, and how much medieval ideas have to teach us in the present and can kind of rescue us from some of these solipsistic explorations of embodiment.

Welch: It seems like, as you say, she also wants to point out how the body was actually a profoundly positive source of women's spiritual experience. Oftentimes, you've referenced this idea of dualism, which we'll probably talk about more. And as you've explained, dualism is this idea that the human person is composed of two parts. So dual, right, two, one is the body and one is the spirit. And there's a story that we tend to tell about the past and in particular about the Christian past. And that story is that in the past, Christian thinkers thought that the body was evil and terrible and the soul was what is perfectible and that is really the seat of who we are. And so, you know, we tend to read and interpret the past through those lenses. So she's kind of saying, actually, we've got it wrong. And especially if you pay attention to women's spiritual experience, you'll see that the body was actually deeply valued and was a vehicle for expressing Christian discipleship far from being a weight that's dragging us away from God, it can be the vehicle that leads us to Him. So let's dive in then to Christianity because she spends a lot of her time talking about Christian practices and Christian thinkers. So just on a sort of basic level, what does Christianity teach or imply about bodies, about living in bodies as human beings?

Johnson: Yeah, I think she shows really clearly that the goodness of the body is affirmed in so many different ways in the Christian story, in Christianity. It's affirmed through the creation, where God has declared that all he has made is good. That includes all of material creation, including the human body. Then there's the incarnation, where Christ offers redemption through the body, through flesh. He's fully divine and also fully human and takes on a physical mortal body, which represents to most Christians not just the sanctity of his own particular body, but of materiality and bodies generally. Even just looking into his ministry and the way he spent his incarnate life of attending, in many ways, to bodily ailments and bodily needs, again, affirming that they're worthy of concern, of attention, of healing. Then of course, there's the resurrection. where Christ is restored to a physical body and promises that same triumph over death and annihilation for all, but not a kind of continued spiritual existence, but a very embodied existence. And I think we have, you know, certain complications to the narrative about the fall and the natural man and what that means, but I think the overall arc points to the ultimate goodness and necessity of the body.

Welch: Yeah, I agree with that. And, you know, it's, isn't it striking that one of our central sacraments or our central ordinances is the sacrament where we take, as instructed by the Savior himself, we take into ourselves these emblems of his body and his blood. That also, as you've said, it underscores that bodies are sacred and bodies are good. They come with certain complications, no doubt, but ultimately we are meant to be embodied human beings. And the more fully that we can live in and with our bodies, the more we are like God, not the farther away we are from God.

Johnson: Exactly, and I think that's the unique LDS twist here, is how much emphasis we put on that, because there is a kind of departure that I find so powerful and provocative, where Latter-day Saint teachings declare in many ways that embodiment isn't just a kind of condescension of Christ reconciling the ineffable, transcendent divine and the material earthly human, because incarnation is not a singular event just for Christ. It is singular in the way Christ performs it and the function it has for all of us and the way it recreates and redeems us. But Joseph Smith kind of situates that requirement of a physical body along a path of spiritual enhancement and progression. We get this from the story in the Pearl of Great Price of Lucifer and his followers being explicitly denied having a body and that Christ and God are embodied and want to shepherd all of the willing children of God into that same process of progressive embodiment from this kind of fine matter to this kind of coarse physical matter and then into a kind of resurrected eternal matter. And so we really centralize embodiment in ways that I have not found paralleled in many other places.

Welch: There's another way that we talk about the body of Christ. We talk about it, of course, in the atonement as he sacrificed his body and his life for us. We talk about it in the sacrament as we partake of the emblems of his body. But there's another way that the scriptures use this idea of the body of Christ, and that is kind of as the church itself. What do you make of the body of Christ as a metaphor for the church?

Johnson: Yeah, it's such a rich metaphor. And I think it helps kind of combat our ideas of over individualizing this idea of embodiment. Because embodiment isn't just what defines us, it's what relates us, it's what makes possible or mediates our experience, our co-experience with other embodied beings. And so even on a very basic level, reality itself is a kind of co-constructed reality among embodied beings. And the body of Christ, I think, makes that even more potent by showing how we are always in our embodiment part of the whole. On a very basic level, I am pinned in space and time through my own particularity, and that requires me to depend on others and their experiences, their histories, to better grasp reality, to better grasp the world. And so there's this kind of existential body going on where we are all part of the body and then that becomes kind of sanctified in the body of Christ by our commitments to each other to bear each other's pains to rejoice with each other's rejoicings. There's both a boundary and a lack of boundary. The definition between where I begin and you begin, or I end and you begin is somewhat porous because we affect each other, we need each other, we can help heal each other. And Christ invites us into this kind of collaborative atonement and healing and reconciliation through this participation in the body of Christ.

Welch: I love that. And you're right, there's this kind of paradox in bodies because they do give us the illusion of being separate, right? My body is myself and it has boundaries and when you really get down to it, those boundaries are pretty porous, but they look pretty solid, right? We're tangible beings and I can look at my husband, he's a separate person and sometimes his body can feel like a veil that blocks me from understanding him. I can look at his face, I can hear him talking, and I can think, I have no idea what you mean. I can't get inside your head. I don't know what you're feeling. Our bodies can feel like a barrier that block us from each other. But as you've been saying, ultimately that's a kind of illusion. And in reality, our bodies are what allow us to come together. He and I, we breathe, we've been married for 25 years. Imagine lying next to each other at night for all those years. How much of each other's air have we breathed, right? How much of the carbon dioxide from his body is now incorporated as part of my body? Physically, at an elemental level, we are made of each other. And of course, we were able to come together to produce our children as co-creators with God creating life through this kind of intermingling of our bodies. There's maybe no better. no better experience or illustration of this idea that our bodies actually allow us to connect more than separating us than proxy ordinances. Don't you think? We go we go to the temple and I'm giving my body for and on behalf of another person. So it's really not just my body. My body is what allows me to connect with that other being.

Johnson: Exactly, yes. And I find that just really, really powerful and sometimes lost from view in an age of individualism and our focus on our kind of own development, our own definition is just how multiple we are, how plural we are. I don't exist in a vacuum. We respond and evolve based on our experiences with each other. And I feel like proxy ordinances are really kind of crystalline example, a very formalized example of this kind of bestowal and giving and taking we do all the time, but here we do it in this kind of ritualized way that I find really beautiful.

Welch: Yeah, it makes it makes visible what is actually our most essential state of being, which is connection and living in and through and for each other, especially those that we're that we're sealed to. So Bynum obviously is not a Latter-day Saint, but there's so many resonances in her work. She makes the point that bodies are both a limitation and they're also a source of power for us as human beings. And we've sort of been getting at that. But what do you think she means by this? How are bodies limiting? How are they empowering?

Johnson: Yeah, this is, it's a very rich vein to tap and I won't do it justice. But here are some thoughts I had reading her work on this issue. And I'll focus for a moment on limitation and how limitation itself can be a source of power and freedom as well as constraint. So she, you know, like we've kind of mentioned before, she sees bodies as, on one sense, just explicitly and obviously limiting. We have a particular location and space and time. We inherit not just a body generally, but particular organ systems and chromosomes. We inherit certain environments, racial, social, sexual, familial, and roles, and these can be experienced as a kind of constraint. But these limits and these kind of definitions around these limitations on our own self-construction, these things we inherit and are just a kind of given, can themselves be really empowering and really freeing. And I think she focuses on one particular manifestation of that, which is this experience of desire. Desire is basically a product of limitation. It is where I yearn for and reach for something that exceeds me or transcends me or is not me. Desire is embedded in love and communication and connection. Desire really is, I think, at the heart of medieval theology. This might be a tangent, but I really want to flag that the main polarity medievalists are concerned about, medieval Christians, is not faith and doubt. It's love and apathy. A lot of their pastoral and devotional discourse is about how can we kindle and catch flame in our hearts. How do we avoid feeling frozen or chilled? How do we move ourselves and keep ourselves in motion so that we stay soft and pliable and kind of warm? I think of the scriptural metaphor of a heart of stone and heart of flesh. And so everything was oriented towards this kind of love and desire as the ultimate driving force, the ultimate end of humanity. We want to be in communion with God, we want to reach God. But that also requires this kind of, this limit, this situatedness. And so I think of all the most powerful human experiences we have, depend on that idea of limitation. You know, love, desire, connection. Even amazement or awe. Jim Faulconer has a lovely essay on the transcendence of flesh, where he kind of highlights that particular experience of amazement, bedazzlement, as this gorgeous testimony of our own limitations. We are surprised and shocked by something that comes from outside us. And so I think that's really potent, that limitation is a form of power. She also talks about how limitation is a form of freedom. It removes the burden of trying to see everything, control everything, be everything, subsume everything into ourselves. We are only ever a part. And so on an academic level, she finds this very freeing. She finds history more collaborative and fun when she realizes that she does not bear the responsibility of having to see and encompass everything. She needs the perspectives of others. And I think you can find a lot of spiritual metaphors in that kind of interdependence based on our own situatedness. So those are a few examples I think she suggests.

Welch: Yeah. I also really noted that moment of fun. Again, so seldom in academic writing do we talk about it being fun, maybe because it isn't fun often enough. But for her, the very reality, which could be dispiriting and paralyzing, which is that I can't know everything myself and that my perspective is limited, she says, no, that's what makes it fun. Because that's what makes it cooperative. That allows me to work with a colleague who can see things differently, and then we come together. And it really made me think for a minute about what is fun? What's the definition of fun? As a 48-year-old mom, there may not be enough fun in my life, but I was thinking about the things that are fun, they really are things that require us to come together and work cooperatively. So it's really fun for me to make music with my kids because we have to work cooperatively and there's such a payoff when it comes together. And when we succeeded in staying together and we ended together and we made music together, that was fun.

Johnson: Yeah, exactly. And I mean, I don't want to do too many digressions into actual medieval history, but I'll not resist this, just because I think it is a kind of stereotype, where what are all these nuns doing in their own cells, just kind of fasting and these monks flagellating? And what is this kind of, why do they seem to flee from or retreat into these kind of experiences? Do they just hate their bodies? Do they not feel a part of the world? Those kinds of questions. And when you really delve into those kinds of medieval practices, it is still always at the heart about communion. It's about, they find a way to commune with Christ through suffering because they identify Christ mostly by, in certain times by his suffering and other strains, they'll identify him by his glory, his vulnerability, his humanness, his incarnation. But I think they really tap into a broader range of physical experience than we are often comfortable encountering, let alone welcoming or embracing as sites of spiritual meaning and spiritual growth. And so I like that example, how you use this kind of limitation. We can think of so many limitations or areas of discomfort or pain that, you know, we don't have to necessarily seek them out, but they are just so pregnant with. possibilities of how we can understand and experience those and use those.

Welch: I agree with that. I even think about even something like convenience. You know, I'm not gonna go back and like adopt medieval practices of self-mortification and self-flagellation, of course. And as saints, we're not called to do that. But we live in a world where everything is always made ever more convenient. And I certainly partake in that, of course. I avail myself of the conveniences of modern life. I wonder whether convenience in and of itself is actually the goal, the main goal that we want to be aiming towards because convenience takes away those moments where we're forced to come face to face with our limitations and we're forced to grapple with the way that reality resists me, right? Everything is thwarting me and I can't get stuff done because everything's calling to me from different places and it's also inconvenient. But if you flip your perspective there for a moment, you can say, actually, this inconvenience, it's giving me a moment to look outside of my own preferences, my own goals, and to see the amazing world out there, and to be amazed by the variety of beings and interests who are all wanting to ask something of me in this moment as well. It can sort of blow the top off your head and open up the prison doors of our own skull, if we're willing to. encounter the inconvenience of life from time to time. So it's one thing to say, okay, in this life, I'm gonna be limited, you know, I live in this body, it's not perfect, maybe I have a disability or I struggle with mental illness. Yes, life here is inconvenient and it's hard, but I'm gonna get to the afterlife. And there, I'm gonna be unlimited and everything's gonna be perfectly convenient and I'm gonna be able to rest forever, right? Is that what we're looking forward to in the afterlife? How do we think about these questions in regard to the life after this mortal life.

Johnson: Yeah, I think this is just such an interesting topic because while we claim this kind of embodied continuity, we don't exactly know what that's gonna entail and what that will look like or feel like. And medieval thinkers had different ways of envisioning the afterlife that I think really capture, I don't know, I love this idea of proving contraries, that paradox is just kind of at the heart of reality and of religion. And so we really need to kind of pay attention to both ends. And so here's the paradox that often shows up in medieval ideas of the afterlife. There's this idea of the afterlife being about stasis and rest and closure, arrival, conclusion. It is complete. It is done. And side note, that's often what is portrayed by male theologians. And then you get a kind of different picture. in the writings of female mystics who envision the afterlife as this unfolding, eternally expanding and intensifying desire and encounter this experience of love. And I think they both really capture what are probably mutually important realities. This kind of, in one sense, an absolute belonging, an absolute sense of arrival of we have stepped in fully to our identities as adopted children of God. We are divine and that is a kind of absolute belonging. And yet, especially in LDS ideas of the afterlife where we add this dimension of eternal creation and procreation and expansion and kinship and relationality where that idea of desire and relationship and connection, that motion, that expansion really seems to come into play as well, but it is kind of sanctified and solidified by that absolute sense of belonging and enclosure. So I think they really depend on each other in certain ways, in ways that maybe all true paradoxes do.

I hope you’ve been enjoying this interview with Dr. Rachael Johnson of the Maxwell Institute. I was blown away by Rachael’s insights and I felt like I was back in graduate school, drinking from a firehose of new ideas and expert knowledge. One of our aims with the podcast is to give listeners everywhere access to the intellectual resources of a university like BYU. Not everybody can enroll at BYU or attend events on campus so we produce this podcast, our YouTube channel, and most of all our books and publications to share the wealth. At BYU, of course, our mission is not just intellectual, it's also spiritual. To assist individuals in their quest for perfection and eternal life, that’s right in our mission statement. So we try to make these podcasts enriching to your intellectual side but also relevant to your spiritual life. At the end of our conversation, Dr. Johnson shares some concrete ways in which medieval theologies of embodiment have improved her practices of fasting, of prayer, and of worshiping together with other p people, sometimes people very different from her, at church. So let’s get back to the interview.

Rosalynde: I just thought it was so interesting how she [Bynum] pointed out that in the past we talked about this kind of dualism of the body and the soul and how the body was denigrated and devalued while the soul was elevated. And as you mentioned, you know, women were often associated with the body, whereas men were associated with the soul. And so there was a kind of sexism that was mapped onto that understanding of the human person. And what she shows is that the female mystics, they actually leaned into it. They said, okay, yes, we have a body. And guess what? This body is going to be the means of my experiencing Christ in the flesh now through these remarkable kind of physical experiences that they would have of love, of desire, of vision, of hunger, a hunger that's both physical and also spiritual. So I love how they sort of said, okay, we'll take it, we'll take the body and we'll show you how the body can lead us to God.

Johnson: Yeah, and that, when you really look into the historical record, she shows that was actually kind of disconcerting in a lot of ways to men. And so this dualism doesn't hold up because of the incarnation. Because Jesus became flesh, the whole register, the valuation of flesh becomes flipped. And so there's actually a kind of ambivalence among male theologians about, well, am I not embodied enough? Can I not reach Christ in the way that these female mystics seem to do in these unmediated ways. And so there becomes a lot of ambivalence and anxiety around that. But also I think they find refuge, and here's where I think the metaphorical or discursive nature of gender becomes really important because they can rely on all these scriptural metaphors of God identifying as a nurturing hen or in these kind of maternal metaphors or as a rock and a diverse kind of range of material phenomenon. And so that kind of gives permission for a sense of, I guess you could say fluidity or channeling kind of different experiences that don't map on in these strictly empirical ways to their physical givenness. They can still, through these kind of spiritual exercises or attributes, kind of channel kind of divine, divine materiality in other ways.

Welch: I love that. So we don't, while we affirm the goodness of the body, the goodness of my sexed body as a woman, it doesn't need to imprison me or confine me to just one certain set of ideas or language or metaphors. We can learn from each other. As you said, we're interdependent and men and women can learn from each other's experience. And again, we can, in a sort of vicarious way, see through each other's eyes and see through each other's experience.

Speaking of men and women, Bynum has a sort of subplot that goes through this article. And it's about the idea of identity. She sort of shows an evolution in the idea of what identity means from an older version that's about the continuity of myself through time as I age as a mortal human being, and then of course through the resurrection as I'm resurrected, how can I still be the same person if the material matter of my body has changed? So that's the big question in the medieval times. And then she kind of shows how that begins to change to a time where today we think about identity in a very different way. Tell us a little bit about her story there about identity and then tell us how do you think we should, as Christians, approach this idea of identity?

Johnson: Yeah, so I think what we can take from Bynum's work about identity is, that can be relevant to us, especially as Christians is perhaps not focusing so much on the modern question of who are we, how do we define ourselves, how do we locate ourselves? But the question that more intrigued medieval people was how does whoever or whatever we are persist and how that orients them to Christ's work and his resurrection as really the kind of big story is that it enables continuity of existence. And they are interested in what that existence will look like and how much particularity will carry over. But I think they kind of orient it more towards what does it mean for the divine to work through matter and to work through this material of composition and decay, how does it become permanent and unchanging? So I think those are really interesting and fruitful spiritual questions that we also are invested in. President Nelson gave a talk last year that I think really touched on some of these themes of yes, who are we, but who will we become, who are we actually, and how do the ways in which we define ourselves either inhibit or help that kind of ultimate flourishing, that ultimate expansion and fulfillment of who we are. So we could talk about that discourse.

Welch: No, I was thinking of that as well. You know, last year, President Nelson kind of gave us three categories for thinking about identity. He said our three primary identities, we all have many identities again in this modern way of kind of checking all the boxes that apply to you and the unique combo that results at the end, that's your identity. He says, okay, those identities, they do condition our experience. There's no doubt about it, but there are three that are primary. And he names those as our identities as a child of God, our identity as a child of the covenant, and our identity as a disciple of Christ. And it's interesting that in some ways, you know, President Nelson, of course, isn't referencing medieval theology in any way he's drawing from the restoration, but it does kind of reach back to those ideas that are that our identity is actually something that connects us to our deep past and our deep future as well, right? That we have been children of God from the beginning. As children of the covenant, we are deeply connected. Our identity isn't about me. My identity is about my interconnection, my sealed covenant interconnection within the church, within the body of Christ. And then as a disciple of Jesus Christ, that leads us forward to this idea that we too will be resurrected and that our identity will persist in some way. And again, there is some mystery that still pertains to that, exactly what that will look like. And we can puzzle over these questions with the medievalists as well. But it seems to me that President Nelson refocuses us on some of those older questions of identity.

Johnson: I agree. And he does it in a similar approach where he says, to really answer these questions, we need to first establish these basic facts that we don't really like to think about, but the fact that we will die. And what does the resurrection mean for that? And how will we exist in this afterlife? So by expanding the kind of temporal boundaries of the self to these deep past, this deep future, as you say, that is an essential orientation to our spiritual approach to who are we and who should we become. And I love how you mentioned that he answers this in relational terms and that is deeply medieval in certain ways it's deeply Christian really, it's just deeply Christian that who we are is a relational, it has a relational answer. We are God’s, we are children of the covenant, we are Christ’s, and these are terms that we cannot come up with on our own. We don't define those, we don't create those, they don't exist in a vacuum. They are inherently relational, and I think that in a nutshell kind of encapsulates the embodied reality of how relational it makes us.

Welch: Yeah. Well, Rachel, as we start to think about wrapping up this interview, let's have a little fun. One of the things that is so fun about this article is that she spends quite a lot of time analyzing a movie that was current in the 1990s, and it was called Truly Madly Deeply, which I actually haven't even seen. But she turns to popular culture to see how the culture of the 90s was sort of enacting some of these anxieties around embodiment. I just wonder, do you think that our popular culture of today reflects any of these same, or perhaps different, new anxieties about embodiment?

Johnson: Yeah, for sure. And I, you know, I would love for her take on the popular culture of today. I'm sure she'd have a really great analysis of it. But my own experience with popular culture is mediated by the very dark tastes of my husband so I apologize. But, you know, a lot of the popular culture treatments of identity, I think are really concerned with technology, with AI, with what does it mean to be a person? Can we be a person if we are just an uploaded consciousness and we are disembodied? Or what does it mean to our person? And that's a reference to the Amazon show Upload. Or what does it mean if we can split our consciousness? Like the show Severance kind of explores this idea of kind of separating out this consciousness that works and this consciousness that kind of lives and has a family. And what does it do to our sense of self when those are pulled apart from each other and isolated? Can we kind of break apart and isolate different aspects of consciousness itself or memory? Whereas back in the 80s and 90s, and even before in the 50s, there was a lot of anxiety or interest around body hopping or kind of inhabiting different identity markers, you know, inhabiting different bodies, old or young, or male or female, these kind of reversals, you see those in all the way through. It's a kind of timeless trope, you know, 13 Going on 30 or Freaky Friday, all of these kind of switches and what does that mean for our identity? I think these questions take a bit more of a sober turn as we see things that in popular culture are viewed as entertainment, but actually kind of being created right now, these mechanisms for possibly uploading videos and photos and voice recordings of loved ones and like there's a Black Mirror episode where that's all kind of uploaded to this blank synthetic body that then takes on the physical characteristics of this woman's deceased boyfriend and ultimately it is not the same and she can't bear the just the slightest dissonance and distinction between the mystery and unpredictability and otherness of the real boyfriend and this kind of simulation that is so close in so many regards but lacks that kind of mysterious otherness and predictability because it is an artifice, it's a product. So I think those are really intriguing questions and Bynum shows how a lot of times it's not academics who are asking the right questions, we can kind of look to our own entertainment and writing to see what's on our minds.

Welch: Yeah. So if we can look to the artists and the writers, it seems like questions about embodiment and identity are going to be deeply bound up with these questions of technology, right? As technology has become vastly more prevalent in our everyday experience than it was, say, in 1995. Now, this is going to be the arena where we are thinking about what it means as Christians to be embodied human beings. Finally, Rachel, after all this rich discussion that we've had, this incredibly fun and provocative article that we've been discussing by Caroline Walker Bynum, what do you think Latter-day Saints can take from this discussion that could be sort of immediately relevant to their lives as people, in their families, in their wards, in their communities?

Johnson: Well, I know at least in my own experience how transformed my own kind of spiritual life has been by engaging more deeply in these questions of embodiment and exploring all the different registers of embodiment. So I'll give a few mundane examples of how I myself have experienced differently a lot of our spiritual practices and disciplines and how fruitful that has been for me. So for example, I can think of fasting, whereas before fasting was primarily in my own experience about self, it kind of conquering a mind over matter. And I've tried reversing it. What if fasting is really matter over mind? It is illuminating how the simple manipulation of food going into my body or not affects my sense of awareness and spaciousness, my receptivity to the spirit, my empathy and connection with other people who are hungry, my own sense of humility and dependence and fragility. In a way, it's matter or the kind of manipulation of matter creating and rippling out into these incredible spiritual effects. And fasting has become much more kind of multi-vocal for me. It can just yield a lot of other spiritual experiences and meanings than it did before when I had this kind of more dualistic idea of mind versus matter. And even just kind of stepping, I've been affected by my own readings of medieval approaches to fasting and how they step into hunger and what that can teach us what each embodied experience just kind of fully engaging and fully confronting what that means, what it can teach us. And, and so I try to have a little bit less initial visceral resistance to those kinds of embodied experiences that I usually want to avoid. Again, I'm not saying I'm seeking them out. I think life provides plenty of its own opportunities for suffering and growth that way. But I also think about prayer and how my approach to prayer has changed. And this, I guess, happened in a kind of unexpected way. Because I think I associated my identity so much with my mind, I focused a lot on verbal prayer and kind of organizing and constructing my thoughts, which I think is really important and has a really important language. Language is also embodied and it is a beautiful mechanism. But there's also this prayer of silence and silence is its own embodied experience. This stillness, this quietness, this emptiness where I allow space for the other, for God, to interact with me in ways that kind of get crowded out when I'm doing all the talking. So changing my registers of prayer to encompass not only what you could call the cataphatic, that's kind of a fancy word for what's manifest, what's present, but also for what is silent and what's empty and what can come in because of that. I've also really changed my understandings of what it means to be part of the body of Christ. And instead of kind of focusing on my own experiences and my own repentance, I see my embodied experiences as the raw materials, the fodder by which I can connect to understand and relate in a kind of more universal way to the experiences of others. And I think that has been really fruitful and challenging, just realizing how interconnected we are. So I think those are some examples. I think just taking seriously and attending to our embodied experience is itself a very meaningful spiritual task. And I think our tradition really gives us reason to think that in large part, this is the task of this mortal stage. We came here for a body. This wasn't an afterthought. This wasn't a kind of accident or something that we kind of was falling. It is so purposeful. And I would hope that would make us, of all people, the most interested in, most attentive to the embodied experience. And I'm really glad for how my exposure to medieval ideas have helped me frame the right questions. It's kind of helped me know the questions I should be asking in that regard.

Welch: I think that is the perfect place to wrap up our conversation. Thank you so much, Rachel, for being with us today on the Maxwell Institute podcast.

Johnson: Thanks for having me.

Welch: Thanks for listening to the Maxwell Institute Podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe and give us a rating or review on the platform where you listened. For updates about the Maxwell Institute, follow us on our social media platforms @byumaxwell and sign up for our newsletter at mi.byu.edu. Join us next time, and take care.