Introduction : The body and religion : Regina Ammicht-Quinn and Elsa Tamez -- The perfect body : biomedical utopias : Hille Haker -- The superfluous body : utopias of information and communication technology : Klaus Wiegerling -- The cultural coding of the male and female body : Christina Von Braun -- Re-evaluating the body in eco-feminism : Rosemary Radford Reuther -- The world as God's body : Sally McFague -- Dichotomy or union of soul and body? The origins of the ambivalence of Christianity to the body : Jean-Guy Nadeau -- Corporeality and mysticism : Tina Beattie -- The immobile dance : the body and the Bible in Latin America : Nancy Cardoso Pereira -- Cosmos - church - body : observations on the notion of 'healing pastoral work : Rainer Bucher -- The western understanding of the body as a global perspective : Farideh Akashe-Bo?hme -- Bodies and gender in Mesoamerican religions : Silvia Marcos -- Embodiment and connexity : an African purview : Gosbert T.M. Byamungu -- Suffering, resisting, healing : an Asian view of the body : Sharon A. Bong -- Mixed-race body, cosmic race : Carmin?a Navia Velasco