Embracing the Body - by Tara M Owens (Paperback)

About the Book

Spiritual director Tara Owens invites you to listen to your thoughts about your body in a way that draws you closer to God, calling you to explore how your spirituality is intimately tied to your physicality.

Book Synopsis

What is God trying to do through your skin and bones? Spiritual director Tara Owens invites you to listen to your thoughts about your body in a way that draws you closer to God, calling you to explore how your spirituality is intimately tied to your physicality. Your body is not an inconvenience-it is a place where you can meet the Holy in a new way.

Review Quotes

"Owens, a certified spiritual director and senior editor for Conversations Journal, addresses the disconnect most of us, and our churches, experience between ourselves and the physical world around us, even though it is in the body that heaven actively meets earth. Through a gentle, compassionate exploration of our thoughts and feelings about our bodies, enhanced with exercises for reflection, Owens helps us to learn what it means to be at home in our own skin and sensitive to the body's innate wisdom."

"Tara M. Owens is a rare find among contemporary writers. Part theologian, part mystic, her insight is bold and rich, and her writing is fine-tuned. . . . I'm grateful for the ways Tara's words have revealed some of my own wounds and fears and helped me make space for new ways of encountering God, through the body, in the body. I will be meditating on this book for a long time to come. I hope the same for you."

"Tara Owen's book . . . presents a compelling vision of what an integrated self-a self no longer divided into pure spirit and problematic body-looks and feels like. . . . Embracing the Body provides a heartfelt, accessible introduction to the many ways we can begin to bring body and spirit back together, figure out what our bodies have to do with our faith and embrace the remarkable implications of a God who took on human flesh."

"Tara Owens offers us a wise and tender exploration of the gifts our bodies offer to us as portals into God's grace and wisdom. This book is much needed and should be required reading in every church's adult faith formation program. Tara doesn't just invite us to read, but to ponder, to engage and to practice so that we might claim the truth of the incarnation in new ways."

"Tara Owens writes with warmth and wisdom on a subject that many Christians have at best distrusted or at worst discarded-our bodies as carriers and avenues of spiritual growth and connection with God. We claim to be people of the incarnation but often live as if only our souls mattered and our bodies did not. Owens calls us back to our whole selves-body and soul-and in doing so helps us reconnect with incarnational living both through the central historical event that kicked off Christian movement and our ongoing task of being the disciples of Jesus cloaked in flesh and blood."

"Tara Owens's Embracing the Body is a gift for anyone seeking to understand how the body-with all of its twitches, itches and bentness toward false unions-is not an enemy of spiritual formation but an amazing gift from God and the ground for personal incarnation-experiencing the reality of the apostle Paul's number one teaching point, Christ within. She makes great use of real-life stories and engaging theological reflection."

"This book is beautiful, learned and wise. It will make you think, and it will make you want to say 'amen'-and, more important, it will enable you more fully to live as a body."

"Truth. Beauty. Revelation. Those are just some of the words to describe Embracing the Body by Tara Owens. It is a rare and insightful book written by a poet who longs to love Jesus with every fiber of her being and invites others to do the same."

"Wise, erudite, loving and tender, Embracing the Body will bring true healing and wholeness to our theology of our physical bodies as a church. Tara Owens is the perfect guide for this holy journey."

"With tender words and emotional depth, Owens offers a sacred space to ponder the fears of our bodies and how the subtle and overt messages we receive from church and society numb us to the murmurs from God that reverberate through our flesh and bones. . . . What does it mean to be at home in your skin? Step into Embracing the Body to continue your own healing towards an embodied faith."

About the Author

Tara M. Owens is senior editor for Conversations Journal. Owens also provides spiritual direction through Anam Cara Ministries and is a part-time instructor for the Benedictine Spiritual Formation Program at Benet Hill Monastery. She lives with her husband, Bryan, and their daughter in Colorado Springs.