I’ve been seeing ads around Madison, in newsprint and on billboards, for this exhibition that is currently on display: Bodies–The Exhibition. A private company has apparently procured corpses from China, preserved them by replacing tissue with plastic, and displays them throughout the world in various poses. The exhibition is alleged to be educational and of scientific interest. I find the very notion macabre.

There has been considerable controversy over the years (the exhibition has opened in more than 70 cities worldwide). There are questions about where the bodies come from, with allegations concerning prisons, execution, and torture. Those are important questions, but for me, the most important question has to do with with what it says about our culture, particularly our understanding of bodies and death.

Scholars agree that one of the great appeals of Judaism and Christianity in Late Antiquity had to do with how both communities took care of the dead. They rejected cremation, the widespread practice in Greco-Roman culture, and saw to it that the bodies of all believers, even the poorest were cared for. This was done because both religious traditions took bodies seriously, especially that there was an unbreakable link between soul and body. Over the centuries, Christians have lost sight of that central doctrine, derived from the belief in the resurrection of Jesus Christ and the resurrection of all the dead. I happen to think that cremation is an important alternative to traditional burial practices, on environmental and on personal grounds. We have become such a mobile culture that the notion of binding our bodies to one place after death seems quaint, and a burden on our descendants.

What’s fascinating to me is that on the one hand ours is a culture that is obsessed with bodies, our own and those of celebrities, yet we can apparently disassociate our essential selves so completely from our bodies that we can look at preserved bodies with relative detachment. Eerie.