ABSTRACT
This chapter honors feminist theologians' attentiveness to the present and continues the author's own affirmation of present experiences by considering how a relational and dynamic embodied eschatology can be both created and anticipated in the present. The eschatological values of embodied relationality and fluidity are understood to be capable of being brought together, and indeed embodied, in the practice of touch. The chapter offers an examination of the meaning of touch, both for others and for oneself. It explores the capacity of touch to communicate the eschatological valuation of bodies, to create and nurture the kind of dynamic embodiments that typify eschatological life, and to hope for bodies in response to difficult experiences of touch. Female bodies have been characterized as more embodied, more material, than male bodies.
