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For decades, Sallie McFague lent her voice and her theological imagination to addressing and advocating for the most important issues of our time. In doing so, she influenced an entire generation and empowered countless people in their efforts to put religion in the service of meeting human needs in difficult times.
In this final book, finished in the year before her death in 2019, McFague summarizes the work of a lifetime with a clear call to live in such a way that all might flourish. The way, she argues, is the kenotic interpretation of Christianity: the odd arrangement whereby in order to gain your life, you must lose it. The way of the cross is total self-emptying so that one can receive life, real life, and then pass this life on.
A masterful and life-giving summing-up of a theology that makes a profound difference for us, our communities, and our planet.
Award-winning theologian Sallie McFague here develops a striking and novel vision of the universe, one that takes seriously and radically both contemporary science and the incarnational commitments of the Christian tradition.
In this award-winning text, theologian Sallie McFague challenges Christians' usual speech about God as a kind of monarch. She probes instead three other possible metaphors for Godas mother, lover, and friend.
A compelling visionbefore it's too lateIn this splendidly crafted work, McFague argues for theology as an ethical imperative for all thinking Christians: Responsible discipleship today entails disciplined religious reflection. Moreover, theology matters: Without serious reflection on their worldview, ultimate commitments, and lifestyle, North American Christians cannot hope to contribute to ensuring the good life for people or the planet. To live differently we must think differently.
McFague's has therefore written primer in theology. It helps Christians assess their own religious story in light of the larger Christian tradition and the felt needs of the planet. At once an apology for an ecologically driven theology and a model for how theology itself might be expressed, her work is expressly crafted to bring people into the practice of religious reflection as a form of responsible Christian practice in the world. McFague shows the reader how articulating one's personal religious story and credo can lead directly into contextual analysis, unfolding of theological concepts, and forms of Christian practice.
In lucid prose she offers creative discussions of revelation, the reigning economic worldview (and its ecological alternative), and how a planetary theology might approach classical areas of God and the world, Christ and salvation, and life in the Spirit. Enticing readers into serious self-assessment and creative commitment, McFague's new work encourages and models a theological practice that gives glory to God by loving the world.
. . . a liberating book about a liberating theological approach.
--Christianity and Crisis
In a readable and concrete style, Sallie McFague crafts a Christian spirituality centered on nature as thefocus of our encounter with the divine. Reorienting our religious life from the supernatural to the super, natural, she suggests, can help us see these earth others . . . as both subjects in themselves and as intimations of God.In fascinating discussions of city planning and wilderness, of photography, hiking, gardening, recycling, urban decay, and poverty, but also of incarnation, embodiment, and sacramentality. McFague urges the reader's conversion from the arrogant eye to the loving eye. She suggests many ways people can cultivate encounters with nature and engagement in justice.
McFague's marvelous and moving new book tutors us in wonder, delight, and love.
This book is not only absorbingly readable but important. For its themes engage effectively with main dilemmas not only of formal theology but of current piety and witness.
- Amos N. Wilder, Andover Newton Quarterly
This book is immensely valuable for its persuasive illustrations of the parabolic and metaphoric imagination. McFague attends both to the interpretive and the evaluative levels of hermeneutics. Her readings of specific parables, poems, stories, and autobiographies are insightful and relevant to her thesis that what religious language 'says' is 'conceptually imperceivable and inexpressible.'
- Mary Gerhart, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
It is at the very least a fine guide to one important direction that theological hermeneutics might take, and more than that, it testifies confidently to the presence of still unplumbed resources of the biblical word and its secular counterpart that are there for the imagination's appropriation.
- Robert Detweiler, Religious Studies Review
Everyone interested in theology will be stimulated by Sallie McFague's mediating theological position and the form of thinking and discourse she espouses. Those interested in the intercourse between theology and literature will be stimulated by the way she links the two and the perceptive way she handles her literary examples. Biblical scholars will undoubtedly note her primacy of the parables as the central corpus of the biblical records. Preachers of the church will be strengthened by the concern McFague has for the Christian community and the importance of the word through the words of the preachers. With this variety of concerns, Speaking in Parables will have a deservedly wide reading and, perhaps even more important, wide discussion.
- Ronald E. Sleeth, Perkins School of Theology Journal
In this timely book, Sallie McFague recalls her readers to the practices of restraint. In a world bent on consumption it is imperative that people of religious faith realize the significant role they play in advocating for the earth, and a more humane life for all.
The root of restraint, she argues, rests in the ancient Christian notion of Kenosis, or self-emptying.
By introducing Kenosis through the life stories of John Woolman, Simone Weil, and Dorothy Day, McFague brings a powerful theological concept to bear in a winsome and readable way.
For decades, Sallie McFague has lent her voice and her theological imagination to addressing and advocating for the most important issues of our time. In doing so, she has influenced an entire generation, and empowered countless people in their efforts to put religion in the service of meeting human needs in difficult times.
Sallie McFague offers a lucid and powerful guide to theological thinking about God and the world, individual and community, humanity and nature, reality and metaphor, the sacramental and the prophetic, and the critical issue of climate change. She calls Christians to new feeling, new acting, and new thinking.