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Book Review: Castillo, Daniel P: An Ecological Theology of Liberation: Salvation and Political Ecology

perfection. She focuses her definition of sin around the problems of fat-phobic sizeism, of the distortion of humanity’s relationship with food (and with exploited food industry workers, nonhuman animals, and the planet), and of the divided, self-punishing subjectivity that weight-loss groups encourage. In response, B. develops her framework of “sensible eating” within which women learn to reconnect lovingly with their bodies and their capacity for pleasure. She connects this to a “Sabbath” mentality by which women learn to rest from the pressure to hate their own bodies and instead celebrate their own bodies and the bodies of fat women which have been viciously demeaned. B.’s constructive reworking of theological tropes in this second half is intellectually engaging. Though B. rightly highlights how the Christian tradition is rife with misogyny and somatophobia, she also incisively retrieves the deeply Christian affirmation of the goodness of the body, particularly the female body. Following Elizabeth Johnson’s reworking of the classical Irenaean axiom, “Gloria Dei vivens mulier: the glory of God is woman, all women, every woman everywhere, fully alive” (6), B. articulates a liberative feminist theology that honors God by encouraging the deep flourishing of women. This feminist theological lens provides a crucial vantage point from which to see the patriarchal, body-punishing logic foisted on women in late capitalism. The analysis does not always hold together, especially regarding the significance of the weight-loss group for the overall argument. Specifically, these women sometimes exert agency by relaxing the eating rules for themselves and by critiquing the fat-phobia of the organization with each other. B. believes that these acts of small resistance provide crucial grounds for a better feminist theology. However, all that these instances seem to show is that the women in the group are not entirely submissive to and destroyed by the fat-phobic pressures that shape their environment. Although this is an important point, it does not seem as singularly significant as B. suggests that it is for her argument. Rather, B.’s argumentative commitments seem shaped primarily by her own already formed feminist theological judgments about what is healthy and what is harmful. An open question thus remains about the normative function of the ethnographic part of this argument, especially given that the women under observation are still largely controlled by patriarchal fat-phobia. More time spent critically engaging the fat activists might have provided a more compelling foundation for the feminist theology here. Overall, this is an important book that would work in Christian theological graduate courses, especially doctoral seminars on feminist theology or theological anthropology. Excerpted chapters would work for advanced undergraduate courses.