Sophia, Goddess, And Feminist Spirituality: Imagining the Future
Though represented by its detractors as an incursion of paganism into Christianity and presented by its supporters as an integrally and intrinsically Christian phenomenon, the truth about the 1993 Re-Imagining Conference’s new language for God is that it was a product of a wider feminist awakening. This was a truth planners tried to obscure by drawing careful boundaries around both who was invited to the conference and what could be said about the connection between Sophia and the Goddess. Afterward, backlash against the event discouraged Christian feminists from exploring radical alternatives to patriarchal God language. In this essay, Christ raises the question of whether Re-Imagining feminists, without relinquishing their specific identities as Christians, can acknowledge that they are reclaiming suppressed aspects of ancient Goddess religions. Doing so would enable them to learn from Jewish feminist experimentation with God language as well as from Goddess rituals.
Stable URL: muse.jhu.edu/article/856251