The Fat Jesus: Christianity and Body Image

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As the brilliant Allen Carr pointed out in his Easy Way To Stop Smoking, the negativity of the criticism just makes you feel bad about yourself and drives you to the illusory comfort of another cigarette. However, just like the images of a black Jesus, Asian Jesus or Jesus with a disability, an image of a fleshy, female Christ can challenge steadfastly held assumptions about how the world is or should be. Lisa Isherwood’s has been one of the most important voices in the development of “body theology” as a form of Christian political theology.

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I review for SCM, Equinox, Columbia University Press, Fordham University Press, Routledge, and Orbis.Rationality, objectivity, rigidity, uprightness, efficiency, discipline and competitiveness are all values we strive for. I think that begins with conversations about our prejudices about what kind of bodies are good and what kind are bad.

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In how the church presents something like a fat body, she notes the message can be anything but welcoming. She also makes sweeping generalisations – most notably about “the Church Fathers”, condemned en masse as villains of the piece – without space in which to qualify or defend them.Encounter invites listeners to explore the connections between religion and life—intellectually, emotionally and intuitively—across a broad spectrum of topics. And as this book highlights, the sins, devils, angels and innocence of the diet industry have their routes in Christian sentiment. Granted, he lived in a time that was hardly overflowing with high calorie junk foods, but Jesus is almost always portrayed as upright, lean and muscular. In the New Testament, the town is a literally joke, as seen in the Bible when someone says, "Can anything good come out of Nazareth?

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Not only does dialogue at table help people learn and grow, it also echoes the pervasive church concept of feasting and goes right back to the example of Jesus: “Jesus spent a whole lot of time telling stories. But there was very little about Jesus — except that he seemed always to be at table, and so could hardly have been thin. Member of the International Editorial Board of the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion, Indiana University Press.While many theologians, historians and feminists remain fascinated with the question of whether there are similarities between Saint Catherine and today’s women with anorexia, the gaps in historical context make this comparison difficult, if not meaningless. While severe ascetic practices like fasting are rare today, one need only look around to see how highly regarded the tight, taut control of the body is in the 21 st century. Isherwood argues powerfully that there are resources within Christianity that can free us from this thinking, and lead us towards a more holistic, incarnational view of what it is to be human. Although I struggled a lot with many of the religious concepts in this book, I can’t really use my lack of knowledge to rate this book lower, so I have to give it 5 out of 5. It’s any community that associates itself with food,” she says of the presence of pizza at youth events and donuts after Mass.

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The fat body, Isherwood suggests, is read as the insufficiently controlled body, the “sinful” body, the body that is too material to be spiritual, the body that fails every test. She does this in a readable way, with reference to popular culture, to Christian history, and to both theory and practice. Programmes such as “Slim for Him” and the “Weigh Down Diet”, marketed extensively to (in particular) white, middle-class, Protestant women, explicitly connect bodily and spiritual states, in part by literalising scriptural references to (for example) the “narrow gate” to heaven and the evils of “flesh”. Deep down, our motivation is not so benign; it’s actually about our own desire to vent irritation at someone else’s weakness. The first person you encounter who makes you feel unattractive, annoying or stupid should not be the first person you encounter at all.The fat woman particularly is supposed to be the embodiment of all that we would rather discard,’ says Professor Isherwood. I see the church as being much more both/and in our theology,” says Father Bruce Wilkinson, a retired priest of the Archdiocese of Atlanta. Catholics’ relationship with food and how it can change one’s body ties directly into central tenets of the Catholic faith.