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In his spiritual autobiography, historian Paul Johnson surmises that when future generations reflect on the carnivorous habits of their predecessors they will be appalled, and—at least as far as people who take biblical faith seriously are concerned—he is most likely correct. For it is doubtful that the brutal, if economical, treatment of food animals in the industrialized world's factory farms is anything less than an affront to God's creation.

Getting Christians to put down their forks and consider such things is one objective of Stephen Webb's new book, On God and Dogs: A Christian Theology of Compassion for Animals (Oxford Univ. Press, 222 pp.; $29.95). Webb, who is associate professor of religion and theology at Wabash College, is not himself an advocate of "animal liberation." Against the "rights talk" of the liberationists, Webb calls for what he calls a "language of care." He maintains that animals need to be loved, not liberated. And he takes human feelings about animals—especially pets—seriously.

"I think that there is something philosophically significant about sentimentalism itself," he writes, and he believes that because animals (and especially dogs) are able to touch humans "deeply and completely," they can teach us something significant. In particular, Webb thinks that animals have something to teach us about divine grace, "the inclusive and expansive power of God's love to create and sustain relationships of real mutuality and reciprocity."

Webb suggests that the "sheer excess" of pets is their greatest value. "[N]ature itself seems to encourage the excessive and extravagant," he writes. "Animals do not serve a metaphysical or moral purpose; they are just there, splurges in the divine economy, embellishments, exuberant. … Animals show us that God loves waste, that God identifies with complexity and excess and not just order and organization. God countenances that which is not necessary, that which seems accidental, trivial, and frivolous." Indeed, Webb continues, "Perhaps [dogs] can tell us something about grace, about the power of God to love in spite of utility, to create in spite of efficiency, and to give in spite of the cost."

When a child requests prayer for a sick pet, we might titter; yet we know, at the same time, that God does care about such things. And we know he cares about things because, speaking of sparrows, he has told us so. (Some of the parents of those children, in fact, have prayed with them for a beloved dog or cat or guinea pig.)

Since Webb draws explicitly not only on his own sentiment but also on the work of ecofeminists and, in one place, on Matthew Fox, it is not surprising that some of his propositions are awkward at best. In at least two places, for instance, he maintains that "God's venture across the great divide to identify with humanity is not unlike the human project of domesticating and adopting the canine species"—a thoroughly undemonstrable, if not just plain weird, position.

In what is probably this book's biggest clunker, Webb suggests that there may be some meaning in the fact that the word dog spelled backwards is god—a manifestly silly thing to bring up because, to my knowledge, this works only in English. And then there is Webb's case for a "vegetarian eucharist," where one is confronted with such bewildering lines as this: "The eucharist risks turning a voluntary act of self-donation into a metaphor for the food chain."

Yet critics, and especially committed meat eaters who might be eager to brush Webb off as just another eco-maniac, should not take such lapses as an occasion to ignore this book. For if a line like "we can hear the animal cries in Jesus' death" strikes an odd note, the paragraph in which it appears makes the simple suggestion that a people committed to the humane treatment of animals, rather than the abuse or worship of them, is likely to be a people committed to the humane treatment of humans.

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