Our human bodies, though always with us, have recently became more conspicuous. They suffer the pandemic and endure violent weather. Artificial images—athletic, commercial, or pornographic—press upon their fragility and demand alteration. Some aspects of our bodies have become easier to read, such as the dignity of our various shapes, hues, and abilities. Others like human sexuality have grown less legible, and what used to seem self-evident no longer appears so. We are realizing, in short, that while our bodies are given by God, they still invite interpretation, like a language we must learn to read. Without the clothing of language, the naked flesh slips toward animal or machine, and loses the dignity of personhood.

What does it mean to be a human body, with its joys, its groans, its endless needs? According to modern critics, Christianity hates the body and the pious await heavenly release. Yet secular modernity promotes its own myths, which struggle to hold together human animality and human dignity. In fact, Christianity preserves some of the most sophisticated and persuasive accounts of human embodiment in Western thought. The divine humanity of Jesus, neither ghost nor alien, stretched the imagination of ancient Christians. Vulnerable flesh, he was fashioned inside another person’s body. The Eucharist became a bodily food that changes our bodies into itself. For Catholics, sexual union itself is a privileged sacrament. As Hildegard of Bingen once wrote, the human body is the medium in which God chose to inscribe his eternal deeds.

If our bodies speak a language, it is because the Word was made flesh. This seminar examines the language of the body as interpreted in Christian traditions. For at the center of Christianity are the animal experiences of having a body: birthing and being born, eating and being eaten, and loving and being loved.