Christopher, I'm delighted to have stumbled on this essay. You're circling questions I'm circling too, just from a different angle. I enjoyed reading the Christian perspective here even though it isn't one I follow - my own view of education comes from phenomenology, especially Merleau-Ponty.
Which is why I felt a little spark when you said "I discover I am two things simultaneously. I am both mind and body - a body-mind unity." The mystery that you point to right after, just how can we be both at once, is a real one. But I don't think it's the "both" that makes it mysterious. Merleau-Ponty's bet is that we don't begin as two things that then have to be joined but that the body is always already one, not a vessel carrying the other around. The body and mind are singular.
Which is also why I want to press on a question you raise later on - about whether there might be a legitimate embodied education. My answer is that all education is already embodied, whether we attend to it or not. Bodies take on new skills, new ways of moving through the world, new ways of being, and that happens regardless of the care we put into it. What formal schooling manages is not disembodiment, because that isn't possible - we are always embodied - but a suppression of the body. Sensorially thin rooms, bodies told to sit still... My own classroom was guilty of that.
My hope is for an education that is truly in-the-world, that takes our entanglement with everything around us as the base condition rather than the obstacle, and treats mind and body as the one thing they already are.
Thanks for this, Christopher! Gave me lots to think about!
Sean, you make a very good point: We are always bodies, so that all education in one profound sense is, must be, embodied. Carrie Eben and I reflect on this in our The Good Teacher in chapter 7 "Embodied Learning." How, I wonder, did you try to teach in ways that honored our embodiedness?
Christopher, I'm delighted to have stumbled on this essay. You're circling questions I'm circling too, just from a different angle. I enjoyed reading the Christian perspective here even though it isn't one I follow - my own view of education comes from phenomenology, especially Merleau-Ponty.
Which is why I felt a little spark when you said "I discover I am two things simultaneously. I am both mind and body - a body-mind unity." The mystery that you point to right after, just how can we be both at once, is a real one. But I don't think it's the "both" that makes it mysterious. Merleau-Ponty's bet is that we don't begin as two things that then have to be joined but that the body is always already one, not a vessel carrying the other around. The body and mind are singular.
Which is also why I want to press on a question you raise later on - about whether there might be a legitimate embodied education. My answer is that all education is already embodied, whether we attend to it or not. Bodies take on new skills, new ways of moving through the world, new ways of being, and that happens regardless of the care we put into it. What formal schooling manages is not disembodiment, because that isn't possible - we are always embodied - but a suppression of the body. Sensorially thin rooms, bodies told to sit still... My own classroom was guilty of that.
My hope is for an education that is truly in-the-world, that takes our entanglement with everything around us as the base condition rather than the obstacle, and treats mind and body as the one thing they already are.
Thanks for this, Christopher! Gave me lots to think about!
Sean, you make a very good point: We are always bodies, so that all education in one profound sense is, must be, embodied. Carrie Eben and I reflect on this in our The Good Teacher in chapter 7 "Embodied Learning." How, I wonder, did you try to teach in ways that honored our embodiedness?
Splendid! I have been doing a series trying similar ideas … thank you for this!
John Mark, let me know where I can find your writing!
https://www.patheos.com/blogs/eidos/2026/08/an-education-for-paradise/
I am publishing part IV today, but here is part 1-4 so far (they go in sequence). . .https://www.patheos.com/blogs/eidos/2026/07/levelup1/
Let me know what you think of the series …