The body is still the elephant in the room for disciplines in the humanities such as religious studies. Scholars have written books on the representations of religious bodies, and pay lip service to the idea that there are living and breathing human beings to which such religious systems ultimately refer. But unfortunately scholarship has not been able to cross the chasm that separates representation from reality. I would never argue that science crosses this chasm either, but I do think it gives us some tools to talk about bodies in new and relevant ways.

This book is about how technologies of literacy interact with bodies and minds over time. Pointing to literacy as a decisive shift in religious history is not a completely new idea, but integrating that shift with vocabulary from the mind sciences is. The book thus builds a hybrid form of humanities scholarship that incorporates vocabulary and states of art from the harder sciences.

Both biological and religious systems are dynamic. They are constantly changing and developing in relation to one another. I view the relation between them much the same as the relationship between genotype and phenotype, between the genetic “code” and how the code is expressed. The case has recently been made by Day (2007) that the anomalous relation between genotype and phenotype parallels the anomalous relation between neurons and mental states.