What We Think With

What do we think with? wonders Craig Keen in After Crucifixion(xii). We think we think with the brain, that “elongated sphere suspended on a thin neck between the brilliant, ethereal blue sky far above to which it is drawn, and the thick, heavy torso with its stabilizing limbs held by the force of gravity to the green, brown earth below.”

Hebrews thought differently: “We think, they believed, with our hearts, that organ in the middle of the chest, in the middle of the body, embraced by lungs alternately filled with sweet, rich air and emptied of it when expended in anticipation of the new breath that may yet come, the heart that pounds out the life-beat of the time that we are given to live together.”

Keen thinks the Hebrews right: “We think from the midst of our bodies, with our bodies, with those social phenomena that are what they are only as they are interrupted and engaged by what they are not.” He has written a book, he says, for “thinking bodies.”

Which is a good thing because Keen is exactly right to think that thinking bodies are the only sorts of readers there are.