Embodied Cognition in Ecclesial Practices
Corporeal Theology January 5, 2023 Tobias Tanton
Embodied religious practices and material culture—such as bodily postures, ritual objects, pilgrimage, and sensory stimuli—serve as cognitive scaffolding that supports memory, emotion, attention, judgment, and conceptualization. Drawing on empirical findings from embodied cognition research, the chapter applies these insights to Christian Eucharistic practices and other examples. While caution is warranted due to methodological issues in experimental psychology, including replication problems and small or unrepresentative samples, the evidence suggests these mechanisms are not limited to elaborate liturgical traditions; ethnographic accounts indicate they also operate in non-liturgical settings.