If Bodies Matter is the Trinity Embodied Enough? A Case for Fleshy Christology in Transforming Exclusion, ed Hannah Bacon, T&T Clark, 2011

The Fat Jesus: Feminist Explorations in Boundaries and

The Cultural History of Women in Christianity, General Editor, Routledge with Rosemary Radford Ruether [Claremont] & Megan Clay [UWTSD], 2012-2021. The series will include six volumes all containing ten articles of 10,000 words. The multiple symbolic importance of food in Christian history has, Isherwood notes, been underrated and under-researched, and as a result we may not always recognise the extent to which theological themes play themselves out in the ostensibly “secular” worlds of food marketing, the diet industry and discussions of obesity and anorexia. And even if many people can’t bring themselves to the point of celebratory embrace, Fisher, who has birthed 10 babies and written about her own struggles with weight through the years, offers an alternative: “Gentle sympathy for our bodies is something I’m trying to achieve,” she says. WOMEN’S BODIES are central to both these books. In The Fat Jesus, Lisa Isherwood explores women’s fatness and thinness. In Controversies in Body Theology, a range of authors cover topics around the theme of slicing, mutilation, reconstruction, and cosmetic alteration. Both books treat themes that are of prime importance to millions of human beings, but that are often hushed up in church contexts. Both, however, somewhat disappointed my expectations. The Cultural History of Women in Christianity Vol 6; 1920 to the present. Eds Lisa Isherwood & Megan Clay.

Not only is there a historical legacy of women being associated with dangerous, seductive appetites, but their desires are perceived to be disruptive to one’s moral or spiritual virtue. By implication, ‘women themselves came to be seen as obstacles in the path to men’s spiritual progress,’ says Dr Lelwica. From Plato to Freud to Jenny Craig, the message has been that bodily urges are shameful, and that they should be suppressed by the higher faculties of the mind or the spirit. The key is control. While severe ascetic practices like fasting are rare today, one need only look around to see how highly regarded the tight, taut control of the body is in the 21 st century. Incarnation and the Rupture of Everything in All Time? The Bible and Critical Religion, New Zealand, 2017 A helpful aspect of the essays here is that they frequently show how all of us are implicated: we cannot pretend these things do not touch us. Less helpfully, I was not con-vinced that the collection as a whole engages with specific controversies in a focused or developed way. It does require a level of personal and communal discernment to work through those,” she says, and the process raises questions of “What does that mean for how we go out and accompany others who we meet along the way?”

Jesus Figure - Etsy UK Large Jesus Figure - Etsy UK

Willett finds that objections to her being fat stem from people who associate her body type with decadence, gluttony, and a lower moral standard. “That’s the body of somebody who is susceptible to sin! They can’t say no to things,” she says of the stereotypes around this. Beginning with the Virgin Mary, the restrained, virtuous woman is a recurrent theme in Christianity. Some, like Saint Catherine of Siena who starved to death in 1380, are referred to as ‘holy anorexics’. They refused all food except the holy host. However, Margaret R. Miles, professor emerita at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California says we notice the female medieval saints’ harsh asceticism because these accounts are ‘titillating’. She says men were rarely written about in this way by hagiographers, making it a highly gendered practice. She is extensively published, has lectured across Europe, India, USA, Australia and Canada. She has a wide range of experience with the media from being interviewed to collaborating with producers and directors to create research-based programmes. In 2009 she was Vice President of the European Society of Women in Theological Research.Dr Lelwica, author of The Religion of Thinness: Satisfying the Spiritual Hungers Beneath Women's Obsession with Food and Weight claims that to define anorexia nervosa as an individual pathology is to miss the symbolic meaning behind this extreme behaviour. ‘What leads a woman to feel so much self loathing and so much disgust for her body that she is on a suicidal path to self destruction?’ she says. ‘No one comes out of the womb wishing they were thinner.’ Even Jesus needed "alone time." The Gospels frequently mention that Jesus needed to withdraw from the crowds. One cave where he spent some time is called the Eremos Cave, from which the word "desolate" and "hermit" derive. [4] We are kidding ourselves if we ever think it’s “helpful” to tell somebody what we think is wrong with them. Deep down, our motivation is not so benign; it’s actually about our own desire to vent irritation at someone else’s weakness. It’s a nasty trait. Look what’s going on around us at the moment, for crying out loud: nobody currently seems to have the faintest interest in the motes in their own eyes.