Open Theology 2018; 4: 117–135 Erin Kidd* The Subject of Conceptual Mapping: Theological Anthropology across Brain, Body, and World https://doi.org/10.1515/opth-2018-0009 Received October 1, 2017; accepted January 15, 2018 Abstract: Research in conceptual metaphor and conceptual blending—referred to collectively as “conceptual mapping”—identifies human thought as a process of making connections across fields of meaning. Underlying the theory of conceptual mapping is a particular understanding of the mind as embodied. Over the past few decades, researchers in the cognitive sciences have been “putting brain, body, and world back together again.” The result is a picture of the human being as one who develops in transaction with her environment, and whose highest forms of intelligence and meaning-making are rooted in the body’s movement in the world. Conceptual mapping therefore not only gives us insight into how we think, but also into who we are. This calls for a revolution in theological anthropology. Our spirituality must be understood in light of the fact that we are embodied beings, embedded in our environment, whose identities are both material and discursive. Finally, using the example of white supremacy, I show how this revolution in understanding the human person can be useful for ethical reflection, and in thinking about sin and redemption. Keywords: Embodied Cognition; Conceptual Mapping; Cognitive Science; Theological Anthropology; The Embodied-Mind Hypothesis; White Supremacy Recent work in cognitive linguistics has demonstrated the deeply metaphorical character of human language. We not only speak, but also think, in terms of metaphor. In Metaphors We Live By George Lakoff and Mark Johnson introduced the world to the idea of conceptual metaphors—the mind’s habit of the thinking “one kind of thing in terms of another.”1 Our experience of arguing, for instance, is profoundly shaped by the fact that we think—and even act—as if an argument were a kind of battle. Our language in this case is neither accidental nor superfluous: “She advanced her argument,” “He’s defensive,” and “That was a successful attack” are linguistic manifestations of the deeper conceptual metaphor argument is war. While Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphors are uni-directional—always one things in terms of another—Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner have pointed to even more complicated ways in which the mind makes connections. In The Way We Think, they describe a process called “conceptual blending” in which the mind combines two disparate domains of thought into a shared blended space.2 This allows them to identify not just when we think of one thing in terms of another (argument is war) but also when drawing a connection between two fields of meaning allows us to think something radically new—Einstein’s 1 Lakoff and Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, 5. 2 Fauconnier and Turner, The Way We Think, 6. *Corresponding author: Erin Kidd, St. John’s University, Queens, NY, United States of America; E-mail: kidde@stjohns.edu Cognitive Linguistics and Theology Open Access. © 2018 Erin Kidd, published by De Gruyter Open. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 License.