and sustenance in a just, ecological economy where all her creatures flourish. For McFague, God is the one 'who judges those who thwart the well-being and fulfilment of her body, our world'. Care for creation – the world as God's body From this metaphor developed another: the metaphor of the world (or cosmos) as God's body. McFague elaborated this metaphor at length in The Body of God: An Ecological Theology. The purpose of using it is to 'cause us to see differently', to 'think and act as if bodies matter', and to 'change what we value'. If we imagine the cosmos as God's body, then 'we never meet God unembodied'. This is to take God in that cosmos seriously, for 'creation is God's self-expression'. Equally we must take seriously our own embodiment (and that of other bodies): all that is has a common beginning and history (as McFague put it 'we are all made of the ashes of dead stars'), and so salvation is about salvation of all earthly bodies (not just human ones) and first and foremost about living better on the earth, not in the hereafter. Elaborating further, McFague argued that sin, on this view, is a matter of offence against other parts of the 'body' (other species or parts of the creation) and in that sense only against God, while eschatology is about a better bodily future ('creation is the place of salvation, salvation is the direction of creation'), rather than a more disembodied spiritual one. In this metaphor, God is not a distant being but being-itself, a characterization that has led some to suggest McFague's theology was a form of monism. She defended her views as not monist but panentheist. The world seen as God's body chimes strongly with a feminist and panentheist stress on God as the source of all relationship, while McFague's understanding of sin (as essentially a failure of relationality, of letting other parts of the created order flourish free of our control) is also typically panentheist. Analysis – the nature and activity of God in McFague's thought McFague's panentheistic theology stressed God as highly involved in the world (though distinct from it), and concerned (as seen in the life of the paradigmatic Jesus, for example) to see all of it brought to full enjoyment of the richness of life as originally intended in creation. This is not the omnipotent, omniscient and immutable