Quotes from Life Abundant (New Book)

 Life Abundant: Rethinking Theology and Economy for a Planet in Peril

 by Sallie McFague 

Augsberg Fortress, Minneapolis, Minnesota, © 2001, 268 pp.

For many years I have taught a course on religious autobiography; it was the first course I taught, and I am still teaching it.  Why? Because I am very interested in people who try to live their faith, who have what I would call a "working theology," a set of deeply held beliefs that actually function in their personal and public lives. Augustine, John Woolman, Sojourner Truth, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Dorothy Day, and Martin Luther King Jr. are a few of these people. Each of them struggled to discern God's action in and through their lives and then to express that reality in everything they did. Their theologies became embodied in themselves; as disciples of Christ they became mini-incarnations of God's love. . . . They are intimations of what it means to be "fully alive," living life life from, toward, and with God.  (p. 3)

Augustine wrote that God is the beloved, the lover, and love itself. If so, then who are we and what is the world? Where do we fit in? If God is the One who is love and the One who loves, as well as defining love, what is left for us? If the source of all reality is love and this source is the goal, agent, and definition of reality, then how does one talk about the world at all? What does it mean to say "God and the world"?  (p. 133)