Practising piety in a (post-) pandemic time: A spatial reading of piety in Psalm 66 from the perspectives of memory and bodily imagery

Situated in the larger collection of Psalms 51–72, also known as the second Davidic Psalter, the smaller group of Psalms 65–68 is found. This smaller collection of psalms can be classified mostly as psalms of praise and thanksgiving. The relation and compositional work in this cluster of psalms become apparent on many points in the pious expressions between groups and persons at prayer, especially in the universal praise of God, and in the imagery referring to the exodus, the Jerusalem cult and blessing. Such piety becomes most discernible in the imagery and expressions in Psalm 66. The psalm’s two main sections may be described as praise, with verses 1–12 being praise by the group or the ‘we’, and verses 13–20 being praise by the individual or the ‘I’. Personal or individual piety and private piety are expressed by the desire of the ‘we’ and the ‘I’, and the experienced immediacy to God by transposing the past into the present through the memory of the exodus narrative, the Jerusalem cultic imagery and the use of body imagery. In this research article, an understanding of piety in Psalm 66 in terms of the memory of past events and body imagery is discussed from a perspective of space and appropriated for a time of (post-) pandemic where normal or traditional ecclesiological formal practices cannot take place.Contribution: This article makes an interdisciplinary contribution based on knowledge from the Psalms in the Old Testament, social anthropology, literary spatial theories and practical theological perspectives on the church in order to contribute to the relevance and practice of theology today, during a time of turmoil and a global pandemic.

Neurofunctional Symmetries and Asymmetries during Voluntary out-of- and within-Body Vivid Imagery Concurrent with Orienting Attention and Visuospatial Detection

We explored whether two visual mental imagery experiences may be differentiated by electroencephalographic (EEG) and performance interactions with concurrent orienting external attention (OEA) to stimulus location and subsequent visuospatial detection. We measured within-subject (N = 10) event-related potential (ERP) changes during out-of-body imagery (OBI)—vivid imagery of a vertical line outside of the head/body—and within-body imagery (WBI)—vivid imagery of the line within one’s own head. Furthermore, we measured ERP changes and line offset Vernier acuity (hyperacuity) performance concurrent with those imagery, compared to baseline detection without imagery. Relative to OEA baseline, OBI yielded larger N200 and P300, whereas WBI yielded larger P50, P100, N400, and P800. Additionally, hyperacuity dropped significantly when concurrent with both imagery types. Partial least squares analysis combined behavioural performance, ERPs, and/or event-related EEG band power (ERBP). For both imagery types, hyperacuity reduction correlated with opposite frontal and occipital ERP amplitude and polarity changes. Furthermore, ERP modulation and ERBP synchronizations for all EEG frequencies correlated inversely with hyperacuity. Dipole Source Localization Analysis revealed unique generators in the left middle temporal gyrus (WBI) and in the right frontal middle gyrus (OBI), whereas the common generators were in the left precuneus and middle occipital cortex (cuneus). Imagery experiences, we conclude, can be identified by symmetric and asymmetric combined neurophysiological-behavioural patterns in interactions with the width of attentional focus.

What do others’ reactions to body posting on Instagram tell us? The effects of social media comments on viewers’ body image perception

Studies have highlighted the influence of social media comments on users’ perceptual consequences, but whether this holds true in the body image context is still largely unknown. This experimental study investigated the effects of social media comments on ideal body perception and how it influences one’s own body satisfaction. Results showed that comments guided the viewers’ perceptions of what is considered as “ideal” body. Viewers of favorable comments to body posting reported greater idealization of the body imagery (i.e. ideal-enhancing effects), whereas viewers of unfavorable comments showed a lower level of idealization (i.e. ideal-derogating effects). Also, the indirect effects of comments on body satisfaction via idealization were moderated by individual self-discrepancy between personal ideal and own body. This study sheds light on potentially inspiring or protective role of comments against perfect-looking bodies on social media while calling attention to the need for reconsidering the media effects theory for body image.

John A. Davies, Lift Up Your Heads: Nonverbal Communication and Related Body Imagery in the Bible

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Short Reviews

Gabriele Brandstetter's Poetics of Dance has remained unavailable to English-language readers until now. Widely considered a landmark book of dance scholarship when it first appeared in Germany in 1995, this provocative analysis of the early twentieth-century avant-garde in Europe is sure to continue to influence a new audience. The book's initial publication advanced the application of critical theory and interdisciplinary approaches to dance that now constitute the field of critical dance studies. Caringly translated by Elena Polzer with Oxford Studies in Dance Theory series editor Mark Franko, this work remains a unique analysis of modernity that illuminates dance as an “act of transmission,” a bridge through theatre, literature, and visual arts altering relationships to how movement is reproduced and how space is conceptualized. Brandstetter's central premise expands through reading body imagery as a historically specific context from which the iconography of pictorial patterns open up perceptual concepts. The interdependency between new models and vocabularies of modern dance and literature appearing at the turn-of-the-twentieth century brace the argument that avant-garde aesthetic debates and concerns moved through body imagery and figurations in space. The poetics of free dance (and later forms of Expressionist dance appearing in Germany) as it took shape in Europe foregrounds the dancer's movement as a transformative language and symbolic system of cultural deconstruction and renewal.

Forming a Social Contract: Hobbes to Anti-Jacobinism

Despite the attempt of social contract theory and its critics to banish Aristotle’s concept of natural sociability, imagery of dismembered bodies resurfaces in political writings circa 1650-1810. Fractured body imagery is a metaphor for a cadaverous commonality that is inherent to modern political theory. From different perspectives, British empiricism, the Scottish Enlightenment, German Idealism, and Romanticism all express a crisis in theories of community through the imagery of a fragmented body politic. Hobbes and Locke unbind the state from metaphysical legitimizations but are unable to reconcile concepts of individuality, freedom, and sovereignty. Adam Smith’s invisible hand retains a visceral memory of the lost body politic, which finds an outlet in the workings of sympathy. German Idealism recasts the conflict between private individuals and commonality as a productive dynamic. British caricatures of the 1790s reproduce the fragmentation of individuals from the social body in visual terms. Together with anti-Jacobin fictionalizations of the social contract these caricatures break down boundaries between ‘radical’ and ‘conservative’ engagements with contract, demonstrating the ubiquity of Aristotle’s ghostly body politic.