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In Back to the Dance Itself, Sondra Fraleigh edits essays that illuminate how scholars apply a range of phenomenologies to explore questions of dance and the world; performing life and language; body and place; and self-knowing in performance. Some authors delve into theoretical perspectives, while others relate personal experiences and reflections that reveal fascinating insights arising from practice. Collectively, authors give particular consideration to the interactive lifeworld of making and doing that motivates performance. Their texts and photographs study body and the environing world through points of convergence, as correlates in elemental and constant interchange modeled vividly in dance. Selected essays on eco-phenomenology and feminism extend this view to the importance of connections with, and caring for, all life.

Contributors: Karen Barbour, Christine Bellerose, Robert Bingham, Kara Bond, Hillel Braude, Sondra Fraleigh, Kimerer LaMothe, Joanna McNamara, Vida Midgelow, Ami Shulman, and Amanda Williamson.

Since the 1960s, yoga has become a billion-dollar industry in the West, attracting housewives and hipsters, New Agers and the old-aged. But our modern conception of yoga derives much from nineteenth-century European spirituality, and the true story of yoga’s origins in South Asia is far richer, stranger, and more entertaining than most of us realize.

To uncover this history, David Gordon White focuses on yoga’s practitioners. Combing through millennia of South Asia’s vast and diverse literature, he discovers that yogis are usually portrayed as wonder-workers or sorcerers who use their dangerous supernatural abilities—which can include raising the dead, possession, and levitation—to acquire power, wealth, and sexual gratification. As White shows, even those yogis who aren’t downright villainous bear little resemblance to Western assumptions about them. At turns rollicking and sophisticated, Sinister Yogis tears down the image of yogis as detached, contemplative teachers, finally placing them in their proper context.

A very large number of people have asked: can Christians practice yoga? To put it more precisely: may Christians practice yoga without betraying, undermining, or diluting their faith? Might yoga strengthen Christian belief and practice—or at least be as neutral as baseball or soccer are toward it? Although these questions could be motivated by solely commercial interests or by mere curiosity, this work is a theological investigation that emerges from the spiritual need to know whether practicing yoga would be compatible with Christian faith and practice. The book begins by establishing an Aristotelian-Boethian method of definition of systematic comparison. It spells out the investigation’s primary sources, noting the great diversity of texts, teachings, and practice that adopt the name “yoga,” and the unified works in Catholicism that guide later comparison, especially the Church Fathers in relation to Greco-Roman paganism. After considering the historical development of yoga, the book asks questions such as, “Is yoga a branch of Hinduism?” and, “Is yoga a philosophy?” A great variety of yogic sources then help formulate a definition of yoga according to its material, formal, efficient, and final causes. After this, the semiology of St. Augustine and John of St. Thomas illuminates the meaning of yogic postures, and the issue of Hindu gods in relation to yoga practice. The investigation concludes by assessing the moral and spiritual issues bound up with yoga practice, including how intentionality affects yoga practice, and whether postural practices always have spiritual effects. Finally, lessons are drawn up from the adaptive missionary work of Jesuit Roberto de Nobili in sixteenth-century India, and the physical prayer postures of St. Dominic, the founder of the Order of Preachers. With fresh insights and original research throughout, this theological investigation into yoga has wide-ranging consequences for today’s Church as it faces non-Christian practices and beliefs throughout the world.