What if “being healthy” isn’t just about your body—but about proving your discipline, your worth, and even your place in the social hierarchy?
From yoga studios to wellness influencers to faith-based fitness programs, it is clear that health and spirituality often intersect in American society. Meanwhile, current scholarship on religion and health often focuses on how specific traditions either help or hinder health outcomes.
But what if instead of seeing health as an intrinsic, measurable good, we looked at how it has become a way to signal discipline, responsibility, and moral worth?
In this lecture, Dr. Leif Tornquist will consider health and fitness as a modern social practice denoting physical eliteness and social status. Health and fitness has become one of the most important ways Americans demonstrate accountability, worth, and social rank, especially the elite and aspiring classes. Hence, the reason why religious and spiritual practices so often intersect with health and fitness is not merely because religious or spiritual people seek health for health’s sake. Rather, as we will see, health and fitness has itself become spiritually significant in American society, denoting bodily mastery and transcendence in an economy of indulgence and plenty.
Dr. Tornquist will look at several intersections of religion, spirituality, and health in the United States, all of which will underscore the social significance of health and fitness as eliteness and the role that religious and spiritual expression play in transforming eliteness into a spiritual concept of bodily mastery and transcendence.
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Your Instructor
Dr. Leif Tornquist
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Dr. Leif Tornquist is an educator and scholar of religion in modern America. He received his Ph.D. in Religious Studies from UNC-Chapel Hill in 2016, specializing in religion and modern U.S. society. His dissertation, Propagating the Divine: Protestant Modernism and the Rise of Anglo-American Eugenics, explored how developments in elite Protestant theology facilitated the socialization of eugenic ideas and practices related to “fitness” during the early twentieth century United States. While his professional focus has shifted to K-12 education, Leif continues to read, reflect, and write about the changing patterns of religiosity in modern America.
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