Torture: The Divine Butcher Opening Confession: "My Father was a Butcher"; Mors turpissima crucis Spectacle and Surveillance "His Mighty and Annihilating Reaction"; "What a Primative Mythology" God's Own (Pri)son; The Dark Twins Closing Confession: "Bless Me, Father..." Dissection: How Jesus' Risen Body Became a Cadaver Prologue: How Jesus' Corpse Became a Book Ecclesia abhorret a sanguine A Gray's Anatomy of the Fourth Gospel; Culpepper's Eye-agram Autopsy, in Which the Coroners and Medical Examiners Converge on the Corpse of Christ Epilogue: "The Miserable Mangled Object" Ressurection: Horrible Pain, Glorious Gain, Pure Muscle, Corporeal God, Gigantic God, Androgenous God, No Pain, No Gain Go(l)d's Gym Colossal Christ; A Fascist Heaven; The Beatific Vision Epilogue: Good Friday the 13th?

In this strikingly original work, Stephen Moore considers God's male bodies--the body of Yahweh in the Hebrew Bible, and the Father of Jesus Christ, and Jesus himself in the New Testament--and our obsessive earthly quest for a perfect human form. God's Gym is about divinity, physical pain, and the visions of male perfectability.

Weaving together his obsession with human anatomy and dissection, an interest in the technologies of torture, the cult of physical culture, and an expert knowledge of biblical criticism, Moore explains the male narcissism at the heart of the biblical God. God's Gym is an intensely personal book, brimming with our culture's phobias and fascinations about male perfectability.

Stephen L. Moore, a sixth generation Texan, is the author of 18 previous books on World War II and Texas history and is a contributing writer for the Dallas Morning News. He graduated from Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, where he studied advertising, marketing, and journalism. Steve lives north of Dallas in Lantana, Texas, with his wife and three children.