Customer Reviews

Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality

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This book, edited by Judith Plaskow and Carol Christ, is an overview of current trends in Feminist Spirituality. This volume attempts to cover many different forms of feminist spirituality including Judaism, Christianity, Pagan, and Native American. It also examines various trends and special areas that are of a concern in feminist theology. Being as comprehensive as it is, I was disappointed that there was no mention of Islam within the book. For me, that was the difference between 4 stars and 5 stars.

The absolute best aspect of this book is the fact that it is so broad in its coverage of Feminist Spirituality. Not only does it contain contributions from some of the most widely known feminists of our age: Audre Lorde, Carol Christ, and so on, but Christianity, Catholicism, Judaism, Goddess Spirituality etc. are fully explored from the feminist perspective. I was raised Catholic and am now Pagan and this is the book that I gave to my mother (who considers herself a feminist) to help her understand where I am at spiritually and how we are not necessarily so far apart in our faiths. I highly recommend it to anyone interested in Womyn's Spirituality.

Dr. Judith Plaskow is Professor of Religious Studies at Manhattan College. She co-founded The Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion and co-edited it for its first ten years; she is Past President of the American Academy of Religion. She has written books such as Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective, The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972-2003, and Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women's Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich. Carol Patrice Christ has taught at major universities such as Columbia University, Harvard Divinity School, Pomona College, San Jose State, and the California Institute of Integral Studies. She is the director of the Ariadne Institute, and has conducted pilgrimages to sacred sites in Greece containing artifacts of matriarchal religion. She has also written/edited books such as Diving Deep & Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest, Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality, Odyssey with the Goddess: A Spiritual Quest in Crete, etc. They prevously collaborated on the collection Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion.

They wrote in the Introduction to this 1989 book, "In the ten years since we wrote the introduction to 'Womanspirit Rising,' feminist theology and theology have grown by leaps and bounds... This time... we found ourselves confronted by hundreds of books and articles having strong claims on us... The issues and tensions we described in 'Womanspirit Rising' are all still here..."

Contributors include Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Judith Plaskow, Charlene Spretnak, Alice Walker, Susan Griffin, Sallie McFague, Rosemary Radford Ruether, Delores Williams, Mary Daly, Audre Lorde, Naomi Goldenberg, Carter Heyward, Carol Christ, Starhawk, and many others.

Here are some quotations from the book:

"While it is hard to dislodge the intellectual misgivings of my colleagues in the academy, I have found it even more difficult to sustein my biblical interests in the face of feminist objections." (Pg. 33)
"...'Goddess' is not simply a female name for the God of the Bible." (Pg. 97)
"And it is clearly the parent AS MOTHER that is the stronger candidate for an understanding of creation as bodied forth from the divine being, for it is the imagery of gestation, giving birth, and lactation that creates an imaginative picture of creation as profoundly dependent on and cared for by divine life." (Pg. 146)
"It is doubtful, however, that we should settle for a concept of the Trinity that consists of two male and one female 'persons.'" (Pg. 154)
"It would be not only absurd by ethically wrong... to condone a Phyllis Schlafly for her gynocidal, genocidal, biocidal politics." (Pg. 203)
"We begin to develop a feminist interpretation because the Bible is a part of the fabric of the oppression of battered women." (Pg. 303)

Weaving the Visions is one of those rare books that changed my life! It totally turned my spiritual worldview upside down--from patriarchal Christianity to an appreciation of the Goddess worshipping religions and how to incorporate the feminine loving side of paganism into Christianity, Judaism and other faiths. I would highly recommend this book to any religious person, feminist person and anyone else looking to be blown away! :)

I read this for class. The professor was um, psycho, but I learned a LOT from this book. It opened my eyes to the Goddess in all of us. I learned much more about our heritages and highly recommend this read.