God's Gym: Divine Male Bodies of the Bible Stephen Moore 9780415917575

In this strikingly original work, Stephen Moore considers God's male bodies--the body of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible, and the Father of Jesus Christ, and Jesus himself in the New Testament--and our obsessive earthly quest for a perfect human form. God's Gym is about divinity, physical pain, and the visions of male perfectability.

Weaving together his obsession with human anatomy and dissection, an interest in the technologies of torture, the cult of physical culture, and an expert knowledge of biblical criticism, Moore explains the male narcissism at the heart of the biblical God. God's Gym is an intensely personal book, brimming with our culture's phobias and fascinations about male perfectability.

Stephen D. Moore is Associate Professor of Religion at Wichita State University.

"Bias has been transformed from something denied or ousted, to something that is to be recognized and controlled, to vital lenses for seeing anew...bias might be renamed slant, perspective, interest, concern, even ideology. Such in the case in Moore's remarkably engaging and sometimes outrageous three stories... Religious Studies Review."
"Bias has been transformed from something denied or ousted, to something that is to be recognized and controlled, to vital lenses for seeing anew...bias might be renamed slant, perspective, interest, concern, even ideology. Such is the case in Moore's remarkably engaging and sometimes outrageous three studies..." -- Religious Studies Review
"Stephen Moore may well be the most brilliant NT scholar publishing today ... And God's Gym is his best book so far ... This little book brims with fascinating readings, packaged in exquisite prose, and informed by sophisticated literary theory and cultural studies." -- Journal of Biblical Literature