This volume of collected essays is an important but in some ways deficient presentation of what major world religions (with one important exception) make of the body and sexuality. Originally based upon the proceedings of a conference held in the Department of Religious Studies at Lancaster University in 1987, Religion and the Body has undergone progressive refinement over a ten-year period of preparation, during which time, we are informed by the editor, each contribution was vetted by up to four expert readers. The result is an intriguing volume, which, in the absence of any viable competitor, will remain important, indeed indispensable, as a resource for some time to come. However, much has happened in the past decade as the discourse of the body has gained prominence, and so while Religion and the Body may have gained a patina derived from ten years of polishing, it has lost topicality, a state of affairs registered in the introduction.
Religion and the Body is highly expert yet difficult to place in terms of what actually constitutes the shared perspective of the talented team of contributors. This is a situation not wholly successfully countered by the editor's over-compressed and allusive introduction. The editor's mind is occupied by a proliferation of agendas, both explicit and tacit, and this preoccupation is further complicated by a heavy dependence upon extensive footnotes into which further subtexts are shunted. Central to the problem is the paradox which Coakley refers to as 'the notable explosion of thought and literature on the subject of the ''body'' in the last decades (that) has begged the question of definition which is not easily grasped, let alone answered. It is as if we are clear about an agreed cultural obsession-the ''body''-but far from assured about its referent' (p. 2). Given wide recognition of the problem of the representation of the 'body' as an ever-changing cultural artifact, Coakley broadly identifies herself with the long-term, yet in effect deferred, task of comparison. While she acknowledges the difficulties of working in the comparative genre, she registers a more modest editorial strategy as she moves from the ordering of the book's contents to issues of substance. The reader is therefore to be led from the known (the West) to the relatively unknown (the East).
In hermeneutic terms, the contributing scholars have been encouraged to bracket the familiarity of current body discourse in order to do justice to their treatment of religious traditions. In reality, there is perhaps a brutal truth underlying this collection: the power of globalised capitalism and the associated processes of disembedding, syncretism and banalisation mean that much of the cultural specificity reported with such loving scholarship is as endangered as the array of natural animal species that now face extinction. The editor of Religion and the Body had a difficult decision to make: whether to allow contemporary theory to predominate or to try, as it were, to help conserve cultural species diversity. Beyond this, the editor hopes that the latent tensions both *Sarah Coakley (ed.), Religion and the Body.