The Practice of Dance

I’ve been reading the new book by Kimerer Lamothe, religion scholar and dancer, who is committed to the significance of practice-intensive, body-based learning in theology and philosophy.
Her new book is Why We Dance: A Philosophy of Bodily Becoming (Columbia University Press, 2015), and will be interesting to practical theologians who care about the theory and practice of embodied meaning in and from religion.
The titles of her chapters are enough to whet many practical theologians’ appetites: “Why Dance?”, “To Dance is to Matter”, “To Dance is to Evolve”, “To Dance is to Know”, “To Dance is to Be Born”, “To Dance is to Connect”, “To Dance is to Heal”, “To Dance is to Love”… and then my favorite for its evocative atmosphere, the postscript: “Earth Within”
–Tom Beaudoin, Fordham University
PS: An interview from last year with Kimerer Lamothe, “Born to Move,” about her vantage on dance, can be found at the “Future Primitive” website: http://www.futureprimitive.org/2015/05/born-to-move/#player