...This chapter discusses the sacred heart, an extraordinarily popular Catholic devotional image with an intriguing set of devotees—medieval mystics, sweet old ladies, and tattooed punks—in light of theoretical work of Foucault on the idea of inscribed bodies, of the cut. Body Christ Cut God's Gym...

...This chapter addresses modern Catholic devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, originating in the appearances of Jesus experienced by nun Margaret-Mary Alacoque (1647–90). Since the seventeenth century, understandings of the Heart of Jesus have shifted from visceral to symbolic registers: from...

... on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy to argue that touch is, paradoxically, the most lasting of the sensory modes in which the resurrected body is presented. T. S. Eliot's “Ash Wednesday” is then paired with a Deleuzean meditation on the fold. The final pair of chapters examines the sacred heart, an extraordinarily...

...This chapter—through the analyses of ritual celebrations such as Latin American Mission’s pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of the Divino Amore (outside Rome), as well as the devotional presence of the Sacred Heart (a fifteenth-century devotion to the suffering of Jesus)—captures (re)emerging struggles...