conversation about God for McFague - both 'fall under experience', and are, in their different ways, themselves extended metaphors of interpretation or 'sedimentations' of a linguistic community's interpreted experience'. The experience of Jesus - his parables, table fellowship and healing ministry in particular - makes him a rich source of the 'destabilising, inclusive and non-hierarchical' metaphors Christians might profitably borrow from him as paradigmatic, a 'foundational figure'. But he is not all they need. Experience of the world, and of God's relationship to it, must add to that illustration and re-interpret it in terms and metaphors relevant to those believers, changing how they conceive of God and thus care for the earth. As McFague remarked: 'we take what we need from Jesus using clues and hints…for an interpretation of salvation in our time'. God as mother Though McFague does use biblical motifs, her development of them goes far beyond what they are traditionally held to convey. She used others, such as the notion of the world as God's body, an image used by the early church but which 'fell by the wayside' (according to British theologian Daphne Hampson), in her search for models 'appropriate' to our needs. She stressed that all models are partial, and are thought-experiments with shortcomings: many are needed, and need to function together. Her work on God as mother, for example, stressed that God is beyond male and female, recognizing twin dangers: exaggeration of the maternal qualities of the mother so as to unhelpfully essentialize God (and by transference, women as well) as caring and self-sacrificing; or juxtaposition of this image to that of father, unhelpfully emphasizing the gender-based nature of both male and female images for God. Nonetheless, she saw in it other connotations, which she maintained are helpful in re-imaging God in terms of the mother metaphor. In particular, God as mother is associated with the beginning of life, its nurture, and its fulfilment. These associations allowed McFague to explore how creation of the cosmos as something 'bodied forth' from God preserves a much more intimate connection between creator and created than the traditional model whereby the world is created ex nihilo and sustained by a God distanced and separate from the creation. However, this same 'mother' who 'bodies forth' the cosmos cares for it with a fierce justice, which demands that all life (not just humankind) has its share of the creator's care