Starving for Salvation: The Spiritual Dimensions of Eating Problems Among American Girls and Women

by Michelle Mary Lelwica

Book Overview

In recent years, eating disorders among American girls and women have become a subject of national concern. Conventional explanations of eating problems are usually framed in the language of psychology, medicine, feminism, or sociology. Although they differ in theory and approach, these interpretations are linked by one common assumption--that female preoccupation with food and body is an essentially secular phenomenon.
In Starving for Salvation,...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0195151666
• ISBN13: 9780195151664
• Release Date: May 2002
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

A new way of seeing the subject

This book is a thoughtful and original analysis of eating problems. Lelwica provides a comprehensive discussion of other work and makes good use of the insights in this growing literature; at the same time, her attention to spiritual and theological issues enhances and deepens her analysis. The result is a provocative and compassionate book that gives us a new angle of vision on the subject.

Insightful & Beneficial Book for Sophisticated Readers

This insightful analysis of the connection between unmet spiritual needs and eating problems has great potential benefit for clinicians, theorists, sociologists, spiritual leaders and any fairly sophisticated reader interested in issues related to spirituality, women's issues, American culture, and issues related to food and body image. The author does an exceptional job at synthesizing observations, statistics, and theory from a variety of fields in support of her thesis that "eating disorders both mask and reveal deep spiritual hungers." I have encountered the truth of her thesis in my own personal experience as well as in my work as a psychotherapist with girls and women. I especially appreciate her articulation of eating "disorders" (bulimia & anorexia) as "extreme incidences" of socially sanctioned attitudes and behaviors regarding food and the female body. She proposes a view that "recognizes a continuum of eating problems, from the exteme incidences of anorexia and bulimia to the more common but related problems of compulsive eating, chronic dieting, and body-discontent" and sees the "differences as a matter of degree rather than kind."(p. 19). While not "normalizing" eating disorders, she demonstrates the "logic" of why a girl or woman without another source of meaning and purpose (a conscious spirituality) might develop eating disordered behaviors in an attempt to fulfill the culturally promoted "meaning and purpose" for women: that of a slender/fat-free body.I think this book is written for a fairly sophisticated audience. I consider myself to be such a reader--especially in this field. Yet at times I found myself needing to go back and re-read sections. And much of the reading is fairly labor intensive. Definitely not a "lite" read, but well worth the effort for those invested in the theoretical and clinical issues around "the spiritual dimensions of eating problems among American girls and women."