Abstract
In December 2015, a US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report exposed the centrality of torture to the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program established after the 11 September 2011 attacks. This chapter engages a heuristic of lived religion to attend critically to torture’s impact on individual and corporate bodies and suggests embodied practices, grounded in religious commitments, to disrupt and resist torture as productive national policy. It articulates the racialized, dehumanizing aspects of torture and the social imagination that defends its productivity. It notes that the very precarity assaulted in torture must instead be nurtured toward human flourishing. While torture can no longer be denied, these revelations must not equal acquiescence, and thus, this chapter outlines prophetic, poetic, and embodied religious counter-practices to torture’s perpetuation.
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House, K. (2019). Torture and Lived Religion: Practices of Resistance. In: Ganzevoort, R., Sremac, S. (eds) Trauma and Lived Religion . Palgrave Studies in Lived Religion and Societal Challenges. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91872-3_2
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