Abstract
I argue in this chapter that, in each of the varied forms of Christian devotion to Jesus, including the case studies explored in Chapter 5, Christian bodies are arranged around imagined bodies of Jesus. Those imagined bodies and the ways of life that respond to them are always in the process of being assembled, always hybrids, and always entangled with the contexts that surround them. Each is built from materials that have been handed on, picked up, adapted, and arranged into new configurations. I argue that the profusion of forms of such devotion can’t properly be tamed by appeal to neat lines of transmission, or measured by any metric that aligns with geographical or cultural distance. The processes involved are always more selective and creative than any such picture allows.