A Sacramental Medium. Reflections on a Christian Theological Anthropology of the Sexual Human Being

Making bodies and worlds

“…I argue that the film's affective economy has a religious quality in the way it creates bodies, worlds, and communities, and more specifically, that these religious sensibilities resonate with Christian affectivities in all their complexity, from encouraging emotions such as love of the marginalized and recognizing possibilities of embodied-affective relationship with the divine to creating fear or shame through discourses of sin and punishment, or reinforcing body-soul dualisms. Thus, my argument about the religious affects of 120 BPM also contributes to the reflection on the affective dimensions of Christianity, and religion more broadly, and on the religious dimensions of affective-embodied aesthetic experiences, adding a new facet to my previous interest in the role of the body as a medium of relationship with the divine (e.g., Knauss 2007Knauss , 2008Knauss , 2014.…”

“…With his ashes spread over the insurers' food, his body becomes a sacrament of resistance in the fight against ignorance and death, a strange eucharist, food not to be eaten but to remain stuck in the throats of those who become fat and rich from the capitalist exploitation of other people's suffering. The sex scene cross-cut with the political action increases this experience of the sacramental quality of the body, with the sexual encounter between the two bodies a sacrament of shared life, communication, and transcendence (Knauss 2014).…”