Sallie McFague (May 25, 1933 – November 15, 2019) 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". She was Distinguished Theologian in Residence at the Vancouver School of Theology, British Columbia, Canada. Life and career McFague was born May 25, 1933 in Quincy, Massachusetts. Her father, Maurice Graeme McFague, was an optometrist. Her mother, Jessie Reid McFague, was a homemaker. She had one sister, Maurine (born 1929). McFague earned 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 earn a Master of Arts degree at Yale University in 1960 and was awarded her PhD in 1964 – a revised version of her doctoral thesis being published in 1966 as Literature and the Christian Life. She received the LittD 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 was deeply influenced by Gordon Kaufman. Sallie McFague was Distinguished Theologian in Residence at the Vancouver School of Theology, British Columbia, Canada. She was also Theologian in Residence at Dunbar Ryerson United Church in Vancouver, British Columbia. For thirty years, she taught at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School in Nashville, Tennessee, where she was the Carpenter Professor of Theology. She was a member of the Anglican Church of Canada. McFague married Eugene TeSelle in 1959. They had two children: Elizabeth (born 1962) and John (born 1964). They were divorced in 1976. McFague later married Janet Cawley, and they were together until McFague's death. She died in Vancouver on November 15, 2019. Language of theology For McFague, the language of Christian theology is necessarily a construction a human creation, a tool to delineate as best we can the nature and limits of our understanding of God. According to McFague, what we know of God is a construction, and must be understood as interpretation: God as father, as shepherd, as friend, but not literally any