Monthly Reading Group, September

Dear Reading Friends,

*The location of the September 21 discussion of Super, Natural Christians has been changed to the home of Florence Sandler, the terrace at Merrill Gardens, to discuss Super, Natural Christians by Sally McFague (Fortress, 1999, 201 pages). This book is fitting for September, as we celebrate the Season of Creation.

Sallie McFague crafts a Christian spirituality centered on nature as the focus 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 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.

Sallie McFague was an American feminist Christian theologian, best known for her analysis of how metaphor lies at the heart of how Christians may speak about God. She applied this approach, in particular, to ecological issues, writing extensively on care for the Earth as if it were God’s “body.”