Some years ago, Meredith B. McGuire, then president of the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR), tried to call the attention of sociology and psychology of religion to the human body (McGuire 1990). In an eloquent presidential address, she claimed that the social sciences of religion "could be transformed" if the notion that humans are embodied would be taken seriously. In particular, she pointed out the body's importance (a) in self-experience and self's experience of others; (b) in the production and reflection of social meanings; (c) as the subject and object of power relations. McGuire's essay testifies to the growing awareness in contemporary general sociology and psychology of the impact of culture on human functioning, including religiosity. Deplorably, McGuire has not found much of a reception in the psychology of religion. At about the same time, in an invited essay in the opening volume of the newly established The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion (IJPR), Richard Hutch (1991) similarly called attention to the issue of embodiment. He showed that the body has been neglected both as an object of study and as "a researcher's best tool" (p. 196). Attention to embodiment, Hutch (1991) claims, could foster a comprehensive theoretical reconstruction of the psychology of religion that works beyond ethnocentric limitations. But if one goes through the following volumes both of the JSSR and the IJPR, one finds no echoes of McGuire's or Hutch's plea. For the development of theory and research in the discipline, this is to be deplored. Theory, however, is not an end in itself. In any scholarship, also in the scientific study of religion, new theories, concepts and methods will only count as progress when they demonstrate an improved access to and understanding of the phenomena to be analyzed, when they enable research of phenomena that were considered unapproachable, or when they make visible hitherto unknown (aspects of) phenomena. Therefore, theorizing about "embodiment" will have to prove its value in its empirical application: what can it add to the exploration and understanding of religion(s)?