She Changes Everything: Seeking the Divine on a Feminist Path

by Lucy Reid

This is not a textbook in feminist theology so much as a chronicle of Reid's own journey and an excursion through the writings of others whose thought has been pivotal for her. In the first chapter, she describes her research into the use of feminine imagery for God in the Bible and Christian history. Discovering the feminine face of God was an affirming and exciting process, and it opened new paths of imagery and understanding that linked women's lives to the Divine and named women's reality as holy. In the second chapter, she combines the Wisdom of the Goddess with that of the God she had known, reaching toward a more whole image of the Divine. Reid describes her loss of faith in a distant and transcendent God in the third chapter. In the fourth chapter, she describes the freedom she experienced when abandoning the traditional concepts of sin and salvation. In the remaining chapters, she describes her departure from traditional Christianity, her engagements with other religious traditions, and her reframing of theology into a life-sustaining, earth-honoring, and peace-making endeavor.

184 pages, Hardcover

First published December 12, 2005

Reviews

[Kathy Stinson · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is not a book I would normally pick up, but having met the author on a number of occasions, I was interested in reading it, and I read it more thoroughly than I thought I might, as someone who doesn't share Lucy Reid's faith.

What I found especially interesting was how similar Lucy's disillusionment with traditional Christian teachings was to my own, and how differently she responded to that disillusionment. I feel I (and other readers like me) are the benefactors of Lucy's extensive research and soul-searching.

There's a new edition coming of She Changes Everything (perfect title) out next year, updated with a new chapter after twenty-five years since initial publication, and I'm keen to read it.