Sallie McFague

Sallie McFague (1933-) is an American feminist Christian theologian, best known for her analysis of how metaphor lies at the heart of how we may speak about God. She has applied this approach in particular to ecological issues, writing extensively on care for the earth as if it were God’s ‘body’. McFague was born in May 1933 in Quincy, Massachusetts, United States. She gained a Bachelor of Arts degree in English Literature in 1955 from Smith College, and a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Yale Divinity School in 1959. She then went on to gain a Master of Arts degree at Yale University in 1960 and was awarded her Ph.D. in 1964 - a revised version of her doctoral thesis being published in 1966 as Literature and the Christian Life. She received the Litt. D. from Smith College in 1977. At Yale, she was deeply influenced by the dialectical theology of Karl Barth, but gained an important new perspective from her teacher H. Richard Niebuhr, with his appreciation of liberalism's concern for experience, relativity, the symbolic imagination and the role of the affections. She is deeply influenced by Gordon Kaufman. Sallie McFague is Distinguished Theologian in Residence at the Vancouver School of Theology in British Columbia, Canada. For thirty years, she taught at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Nashville, TN where she was the Carpenter Professor of Theology. She is a member of the Anglican Church of Canada.