Since the debut of transplant technologies in the 1950’s, the vast majority of religious traditions have articulated a spartan endorsement of organ transplant, assenting to the endeavor to save lives and improve health without foraying into the ethical and theological thickets the technology raises: Am I my body? Do I own it? Can I sell it? What marks death? How long is the long enough life? Is life a gift that can be given? Where does it come from? Who can give it? Who can and should receive it?

I argue that organ donors and recipients encounter these existential questions and a range of religious and spiritual responses both in their experience of transplant and in the broader transplant discourses of North America. The dissertation is an ethnographic study of religion as conceived and experienced by organ transplant recipients and donors. Lived religion constitutes the most vital realm for probing the theological import and implications of transplantation given the absence of extensive theological regard for organ transplant from religious officials and institutions. The dissertation is also a cultural study of North America’s collective expressions of transplant as found in popular media, advocacy literature, public policy statements and social rituals. The popular discourse on organ transplant is pervaded by largely Christian language, values and symbolism. This discourse provides a religious imaginary that simultaneously contributes to and contradicts personal narratives and experiences of transplant.

Fundamentally, the study works to allow the religious discourses and dimensions of the transplant experience to be heard. In addition, the resurrected bodies that transplant proffers bear witness to the nature of religion in contemporary North America; the impress of the transplant body can be observed in the syncretic spirituality of donors and recipients, in the reified bodies and salvific medicine of popular ‘mediated’ religiosity, and in the civil religion – the use of religious metaphor and ritual directive by the body politic.