Virtuous Bodies breaks new ground in the field of Buddhist ethics by investigating the diverse roles bodies play in ethical development. Traditionally, Buddhists assumed a close connection between body and morality. Thus Buddhist literature contains descriptions of living beings that stink with sin, are disfigured by vices, or are perfumed and adorned with virtues. Taking an influential early medieval Indian Mah=ay=ana Buddhist text-'S=antideva's Compendium of Training ('Sik,s=asamuccaya)-as a case study, Susanne Mrozik demonstrates that Buddhists regarded ethical development as a process of physical and moral transformation. Mrozik chooses The Compendium of Training because it quotes from over one hundred Buddhist scriptures, allowing her to reveal a broader Buddhist interest in the ethical significance of bodies. The text is a training manual for bodhisattvas, especially monastic bodhisattvas. In it, bodies function as markers of, and conditions for, one's own ethical development. Most strikingly, bodies also function as instruments for the ethical development of others. When living beings come into contact with the virtuous bodies of bodhisattvas, they are transformed physically and morally for the better. Virtuous Bodies explores both the centrality of bodies to the bodhisattva ideal and the corporeal specificity of that ideal. Arguing that the bodhisattva ideal is an embodied ethical ideal, Mrozik poses an array of fascinating questions: What does virtue look like? What kinds of physical features constitute virtuous bodies? What kinds of bodies have virtuous effects on others? Drawing on a range of contemporary theorists, this book engages in a feminist hermeneutics of recovery and suspicion in order to explore the ethical resources Buddhism offers to scholars and religious practitioners interested in the embodied nature of ethical ideals.

Investigating the diverse roles bodies play in Buddhist ethical development, this book takes an influential early medieval Indian Mahayana Buddhist text (Nullantideva's 'Compendium of Training') as a case study.

If eugenics -- the science of eliminating kinds of undesirable human beings from the species record -- came to overdetermine the late 19th century in relation to disability, the 20th century may be best characterized as managing the repercussions for variable human populations. A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age provides an interdisciplinary overview of disability as an outpouring of professional, political, and representational efforts to fix, correct, eliminate, preserve, and even cultivate the value of crip bodies. This book pursues analyses of disability's deployment as a wellspring for an alternative ethics of living in and alongside the body different while simultaneously considering the varied social and material contexts of devalued human differences from World War I to the present. In short, this volume demonstrates that, in Ozymandias-like ways, the Western Project of the Human with its perpetuation of body-mind hierarchies lies crumbling in the deserts of failed empires, genocidal furies, and the rejuvenating myths of new nation states in the 20th century. An essential resource for researchers, scholars and students of history, literature, culture, philosophy, rehabilitation, technology, and education, A Cultural History of Disability in the Modern Age explores such themes and topics as: atypical bodies; mobility impairment; chronic pain and illness; blindness; deafness; speech; learning difficulties; and mental health while wrestling with their status as unreliable predictors of what constitutes undesirable humanity.

A path-breaking scholar's insightful reexamination of the resurrection of the body and the construction of the self When people talk about the resurrection they often assume that the bodies in the afterlife will be perfect. But which version of our bodies gets resurrected--young or old, healthy or sick, real-to-life or idealized? What bodily qualities must be recast in heaven for a body to qualify as both ours and heavenly? The resurrection is one of the foundational statements of Christian theology, but when it comes to the New Testament only a handful of passages helps us answer the question "What will those bodies be like?" More problematically, the selection and interpretation of these texts are grounded in assumptions about the kinds of earthly bodies that are most desirable. Drawing upon previously unexplored evidence in ancient medicine, philosophy, and culture, this illuminating book both revisits central texts--such as the resurrection of Jesus--and mines virtually ignored passages in the Gospels to show how the resurrection of the body addresses larger questions about identity and the self.

In Deadly Virtue, Heather Martel argues that the French Protestant attempt to colonize Florida in the 1560s significantly shaped the developing concept of race in sixteenth-century America. Telling the story of the short-lived French settlement of Fort Caroline in what is now Jacksonville, Florida, Martel reveals how race, gender, sexuality, and Christian morality intersected to form the foundations of modern understandings of whiteness. Equipped with Calvinist theology and humoral science, an ancient theory that the human body is subject to physical change based on one’s emotions and environment, French settlers believed their Christian love could transform the cultural, spiritual, and political allegiances of Indigenous people. But their conversion efforts failed when the colony was wiped out by the Spanish. Martel explains that the French took this misfortune as a sign of God’s displeasure with their collaborative ideals, and from this historical moment she traces the growth of separatist colonial strategies. Through the logic of Calvinist predestination, Martel argues, colonists came to believe that white, Christian bodies were beautiful, virtuous, entitled to wealth, and chosen by God. The history of Fort Caroline offers a key to understanding the resonances between religious morality and white supremacy in America today.