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She Who Changes: Re-imagining the Divine in the World
Can we re-imagine divine power as deeply related to the changing world? Can we re-imagine the creation of the world as an ongoing process of co-creation in which every individual from particles of atoms to human beings plays a part? Can we re-imagine Goddess/God as the most relational of all relational beings? Can we re-imagine the world as the body of Goddess/God? If we can, then we can understand the deeper meaning of female images of divine power, including Goddess, God-She, Sophia, and Shekhina. Many traditional understandings of divine power begin with thinly disguised rejections of the female body and connection to the natural world. Women theologians from Jewish, Christian, Goddess, and other traditions are re-imagining divine and human power as embodied, embedded in a changing world, and deeply related to all beings in the web of life. Drawing on the work of process philosopher Charles Hartshorne - whose insights deserve a wider hearing - Carol P. Christ offers intellectual foundations for deeply held feelings about the meanings of female images of divine power. Her gift is the ability to make complex ideas seem simple and radically new ideas seem familiar. This book is addressed to everyone who has ever wondered about the implications of re-imagining God as female.
287 pages, Paperback
First published July 18, 2003
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260 people want to read
About the author
Carol P. Christ
19 books45 followersCarol P. Christ, who was a leading feminist thea-logian and a founding voice in the study of women and religion, was named one of the Thirteen Most Infuential People in Goddess Spirituality. She held a Ph.D. in Religious Studies from Yale University and taught at California Institute of Integral Studies, Claremont Graduate University, Harvard Divinity School, Columbia University, and San Jose State University. She was the Director of the Ariadne Institute and led the Goddess Pilgrimage to Crete (www.goddessariadne. org). Her books include She Who Changes, Rebirth of the Goddess, Laughter of Aphrodite, Diving Deep and Surfacing, and with Judith Plaskow, Goddess and God in the World and the ground-breaking anthologies Weaving the Visions and Womanspirit Rising. She lived in Greece where she ran for of ce with the Green Party and worked with World Wildlife Fund to save bird and wildlife habitats.
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February 8, 2021Systematic yet approachable, Christ uses process philosophy as a tool to critique traditional notions of divinity as rooted in misogyny, and perhaps more importantly, to syncretize a new view of Goddess/God* as co-creator of the world along with us. She goes chapter-by-chapter through the "six theological mistakes" identified by Charles Hartshorne, discussing the "Problems with God" (a chapter title) they create, and how Goddess/God is reformulated from a process philosophy point of view once we strip these mistakes from our view of Goddess/God:
1. God is absolutely perfect and therefore unchangeable.
2. God's unsympathetic goodness.
3. Omnipotence.
4. Omniscience.
5. Immortality as a career after death.
6. Revelation as infallible.
As someone who left behind (Ha! Take THAT, Jerry B. Jenkins) a traditional American evangelical Christianity for a social-justice-oriented evangelical Christianity and then left that behind, too, I find Christ's reformulation of divinity not only coherent but resonant and powerful. I'd challenge anyone embedded in a particular religious tradition to read and grapple with Christ's ideas.
*The term for divinity that Christ uses throughout the book.
3S
1. God is absolutely perfect and therefore unchangeable.
2. God's unsympathetic goodness.
3. Omnipotence.
4. Omniscience.
5. Immortality as a career after death.
6. Revelation as infallible.
As someone who left behind (Ha! Take THAT, Jerry B. Jenkins) a traditional American evangelical Christianity for a social-justice-oriented evangelical Christianity and then left that behind, too, I find Christ's reformulation of divinity not only coherent but resonant and powerful. I'd challenge anyone embedded in a particular religious tradition to read and grapple with Christ's ideas.
*The term for divinity that Christ uses throughout the book.
3S
November 10, 2021
Process philosophy/theology from a feminist perspective.
Nuggets of wisdom and insight mired in a text that, at times, is a bit rambling. I feel that the author could have just as easily explained her thesis in half as many pages.
Nuggets of wisdom and insight mired in a text that, at times, is a bit rambling. I feel that the author could have just as easily explained her thesis in half as many pages.
August 12, 2021
The more I read this, the more I disliked it.
I seem to be in the minority here, so I'll try to explain why I disliked this one. There are some good things in here I appreciated, but this way of thinking would very quickly swamp me in just -- abject despair. Perhaps that's a personal flaw, but there are definitely some aspects that Carol (rest in peace) did not examine thoroughly about how this philosophy would play out in the real world, or seem to be more a reaction toward more mainstream beliefs than anything else.
The biggest example of this would be the 'reason for hope' as she puts it. There is none. Absolutely none in process philosophy. It's atheism with a pretty name tag. As much as she tries to make a big deal out of the possibility of co-creating the future, on focusing on whatever small details in our lives that are good or beautiful, that's nowhere near enough. Carol, like many atheists, was unfortunately under the impression that the only reason someone would believe (or want to believe) in any form of afterlife is because they're trying to avoid responsibility in this life -- that they will use the existence of an afterlife or reincarnation as an excuse not to fix things in this life, because the next one will be better. Carol, like many atheists, says a few times in this book that the absence of any divine intervention or afterlife puts the responsibility for our choices in our own hands and its up to us to fix our own problems.
The thing is -- as she also mentioned several times through the book -- there are *so many problems,* the vast majority of which are outside of any individual's hands to fix, that it is overwhelming even with a belief in a God who intervenes and gives you happy afterlives. Plenty of people who fervently believe in afterlives or heaven or whatever else do so while also doing their best on earth to correct problems here and now; in many cases religious people were the first ones to begin the charities and public works that we need. The people who would avoid fixing things because there are better things to come would likely be the same who would sit back and avoid fixing things because there is no point since we're all going to die one day anyway. This hypothetical of hers does not bear out in reality.
And the absolute despair that sets in when you take away even the tiniest naïve hope in a better life to come -- I can't breathe with it. A vivid example: I'm vegan because I am acutely aware of the horrific suffering of factory farmed animals. More than 200 million land animals were killed today (include sea creatures, and you're looking at nearly 3 billion today). Every day. More than 30 billion have been killed in the US since January as of this writing (7/21/21). The vast majority of them are bred into existence purely to kill them once they're large enough to slaughter, or kept to reproduce in the most vile, horrific conditions the mind can possibly imagine. No matter how strictly vegan I am, no matter how many people I successfully convince to go vegan, another 200 million died today. And tomorrow. And the day after. And likely for a long time to come.
Even with the wildest hope that there could be something after death for those beings we destroy, living with the knowledge of what we as a species does every day is agony of a very particular kind. To deny the possibility of something more after this life, on what seems more to be a reaction to major monotheisms on her part, would invoke in me a rage so fantastic, I could see myself going down a very dark road to stop at all costs those people who take the lives of those billions we slaughter every year. Very little stops me now.
And that's another thing that bothers me about Carol's writing: she was acutely aware of women's suffering, but not of animals'. It's wonderful that she was such a strong feminist, and that she did what she could to help create change is equally wonderful. But even with her philosophy, even with her belief in all things as Beings, and a Someone rather than inert matter, she still talks of eating animals. She describes herself eating fish in some lovely little village in Greece, but she should have been aware at least of the horrific effects the fishing industry alone has on the ocean, through trawling, accidental death of other species tangled in nets and abandoned fishing gear, never mind the pollution that accompanies these massive ships -- on the ecological level, at least, which she seemed to be so passionate about, she should have been very much against eating seafood. This is before we even consider the terror, pain, and loss of life that accompanies every fishing trip so she can talk of 'enjoying life' the way she claims deity wants all of us to do. That this never appears to have crossed her mind, that the subjugation and murder of those who do not want to die is permissible in the pursuit of enjoying life as a human -- especially as there is a good argument that when humans can rationalize the subjection of animals, we can rationalize the segregation of humans in a similar way, so that it is possible for the degradation of women, of people of colour, and further to those who merely think differently or believe differently to happen in the first place -- bothered me most throughout this book.
Carol didn't really go into depth on why exactly it is necessary for process philosophy to dismiss the idea of life after death. She gave brief glimpses, such as saying modern science doesn't think there is anything, and again when she discussed NDEs (near death experiences, which she called "life-after-life" experiences, which was cringey, I don't care where she cited it from). Interestingly, she insisted that those who experienced NDEs were still embodied, and therefore we cannot know anything about what comes next even though I'm pretty certain there are NDEs from people who were quite dead before coming back to us. And while I do not give much truck to past life regressions either, she was more willing to dismiss past life regression as possibly tapping into someone else's memory (just say you don't think they're real, rather than coming up with something even more ridiculous, hey??). It really seems to be more that she saw all these modern faiths she disagreed with believing in life after death, and so she was going to believe the opposite.
(Her insistence that the mind and the body are one continuum and completely inseparable = therefore, no afterlife, seems be from the same I'll-do-the-opposite drive -- after reading Doing Harm, I honestly cannot believe psychosomatic illness is in any way real though Carol does -- though I won't get more into that as this review is long enough as it is, good gracious.)
Each chapter also ended in the same fashion, proposing that perhaps the topic discussed in that chapter only came into being because it was somehow a result of rejecting the female body. Which -- no, a lot of the things she discussed did not. The idea of coming from a perfect place, an Eden, a time long ago where there was no sickness, suffering, or death didn't come from thinking women are dirty base creatures, it came from a natural inclination to think life 'shouldn't be this way,' that there must be something wrong for suffering and pain and death to exist now, so perhaps once upon a time those things didn't exist. The idea of a before time that was perfect now needs an Event that causes things to become the way they are now, and it is at this point that accretions over time occur, most visible in the idea that Eve ruined it for everybody by eating an apple. The hope for life after death is not because being born once from a woman 'wasn't good enough' as she writes (pg 208), but most likely arose from the obvious patterns in the world around early humans: spring follows winter, and trees that appeared dead burst back into bloom; later agriculture enforces this idea as each crop is cut down but the seed of that harvest grows again next season in new life. Hope that one day we would rise again like the grain, that we would come again into vibrant life like the trees, naturally translates into beliefs about life past death, even on the most base level that a species will continue even though members of it may die. She would have been better off making her argument on that level rather than trying to crowbar some misogyny angle into it, at least; but belief in afterlives is absolutely not just an invention of woman-hating faithful at any rate.
----
7/28/2021: Returning to add to this after reading The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind and nearly half of Living the Sky: The Cosmos of the American Indian to point out that her entire premise of nature or pagan religions accepting finitude coupled with the lack of afterlife is completely disprovable as even the most cursory look through history would have informed her. As Lecouteux pointed out in the book cited above, the introduction of Christianity was the first breakup of the family unit in that it broke the bonds between the living and dead family members. Dead family members were very much alive, returning from their graves to walk around at night or feast with each other in their burial mounds or to live in the mountains (which is a particularly widespread belief, seen in Native American, European, and Far Eastern cultures such as China, to my knowledge; likely in many more cultures as well). Funerals were described disapprovingly as joyous parties by bishops of the early conversion periods; not because Europeans were ecstatic their loved ones had disintegrated and become part of the earth, but because they had simply moved house, and now lived in the mound. Parties were held there, people went regularly to visit their beloved dead to update them on current events and to ask advice; dreams were seen as a communication between the dead and the living and were often deliberately sought for as answer to a problem.
The only examples I am aware of that are nature-based religions which also believe in a complete end at death would likely be modern paganisms and reconstructions with believers who are coupling modern science with their nature-loving path. Carol (deliberately?) obfuscated this through her writing, making it seem that the original beliefs were only later corrupted by big bad monotheisms who believed in heavens and hells, but the only real difference between monotheism and the earlier paganism was the idea that the dead went 'away' permanently to heaven or hell, no longer able to be contacted by the living. The pushback against this idea is what gives rise to the idea of purgatory, to praying for the dead, to the idea of sinners serving their terms in purgatory not in a specific location but as wanderers through the earth (see Lecouteux's book!), and why we have All Souls' Day in the Catholic Calendar.
It would seem then, at best, that Carol did not do any research into the old pagan religions of the past (even though she studied theology) and honestly, this kind of oversight is really inexcusable. While she presents a new idea of how to relate to the world, I would rather have seen an honest and factual depiction of the things she dismisses, if for no other reason than that readers could have also made the decision whether or not to dismiss them as she does. Very, very disappointed.
----
Another flaw that I feel is a pretty major one concerns the idea of the entire universe as the body of Goddess/God (as Carol referred to deity). As a logical extension of how we conceive of deity -- moving from tiny local deity that only inhabits our mountain/river/cave/etc., to larger locales, to becoming more transcendent as peoples move around, to eventually becoming a deity of all peoples rather than a few -- I could see a Goddess/God who is literally the universe or at least present outside of our home planet becoming the next commonplace in a space-age time where people were jetting off through the stars and setting up on other planets. But as people struggle right now to believe a deity who created the planet and everything on it could also care for them personally, a deity who is literally the ever-expanding universe would seem only to make that a more ridiculous proposal than Carol wanted to admit. In a universe this large, no matter how loving that deity is, could the suffering on one planet even register? This is, I think, where the idea of chosenness or the importance of Earth does a favor for the idea of a singular deity, though Carol hated the idea (but if Earth isn't somehow special, why else would the individual sufferings of beings on it ever be noticed by a Goddess/God that large?). And though she dismissed the idea of polytheism as being without underlying unity (though it nearly always did in history and often does in reconstructionist faiths today, where the many gods are descendants or aspects, etc. of a greater but distant deity considered to be the All or Originator), it could have come into her favor here also, perhaps where Goddess/God is somehow the embodiment of this planet in particular.
There was also the interesting tidbit brought up occasionally that process philosophy does, in fact, go against modern science as much as she proudly touted where it does align elsewhere, as she writes that process philosophy does not mesh with the idea that there was a beginning to the universe or a time before the universe existed. As modern science does agree that there was definitely a beginning (the universe would not be continuing to expand otherwise), process philosophy does stumble a bit here.
In the end, I didn't think she did justice by other modes of belief. As a Filiani, I don't see why belief in a transcendent Deity at the heart of things, with a more 'active' aspect as seen in the Daughter, is discarded as unworthy. That the Daughter became the literal fabric of the world is a belief in at least some Madrian thought and would mesh with Carol's vision of the universe as the body of deity, while the idea of a Deity who is both the loving, passive Ground of all things and the active, caring principle -- as well as the figure of the Dark Mother as the unknowable side of Deity while at the same time embracing darkness as part of deity as Carol wanted -- seems to blend many of the best aspects of several philosophies and faiths together in a very fine way. Her insistence that all humans/beings are differentiated individuals who are not ultimately deity didn't fit well with the idea that Deity is literally in all things, that the universe is the body of Deity: it seemed that as much as Carol tried to distance herself from monism, she still seemed to end up describing process philosophy as tending toward monist anyway. Put in other words, if the ground of all things is water, and the water is in all things, even if I am tea, you are coffee, and someone else is juice, we are individuals with our differences, but at some level the same -- water. If I understand monism correctly, I don't think process philosophy can really say it isn't monist.
This is a very long review for a fairly short little book, and quite a lot of words to say I didn't like it, but as Carol points out, philosophies are there to be discussed, to be shaped and molded and changed. Though she expects feminism to do the most when added to process philosophy, I think veganism would be an even better choice to see the greatest change and most compassion extended to truly all beings, though that is swapping one controversial movement for an even more controversial one!, and I think process philosophy falls dearly short on many of the aspects of life (such as hope) that I feel are the heart of any philosophy that hopes to reach a large number of people. This re-imagining of the divine made for some truly depressing reading the past few days that I need time to recover from; I think I will stick with those forms of belief Carol and her heroes found theological mistakes in, warts and all, for at least that way I can live, striving to make change happen -- and have hope for a better day. Even if that better day never comes, I need to have hope to continue. We all do.
I seem to be in the minority here, so I'll try to explain why I disliked this one. There are some good things in here I appreciated, but this way of thinking would very quickly swamp me in just -- abject despair. Perhaps that's a personal flaw, but there are definitely some aspects that Carol (rest in peace) did not examine thoroughly about how this philosophy would play out in the real world, or seem to be more a reaction toward more mainstream beliefs than anything else.
The biggest example of this would be the 'reason for hope' as she puts it. There is none. Absolutely none in process philosophy. It's atheism with a pretty name tag. As much as she tries to make a big deal out of the possibility of co-creating the future, on focusing on whatever small details in our lives that are good or beautiful, that's nowhere near enough. Carol, like many atheists, was unfortunately under the impression that the only reason someone would believe (or want to believe) in any form of afterlife is because they're trying to avoid responsibility in this life -- that they will use the existence of an afterlife or reincarnation as an excuse not to fix things in this life, because the next one will be better. Carol, like many atheists, says a few times in this book that the absence of any divine intervention or afterlife puts the responsibility for our choices in our own hands and its up to us to fix our own problems.
The thing is -- as she also mentioned several times through the book -- there are *so many problems,* the vast majority of which are outside of any individual's hands to fix, that it is overwhelming even with a belief in a God who intervenes and gives you happy afterlives. Plenty of people who fervently believe in afterlives or heaven or whatever else do so while also doing their best on earth to correct problems here and now; in many cases religious people were the first ones to begin the charities and public works that we need. The people who would avoid fixing things because there are better things to come would likely be the same who would sit back and avoid fixing things because there is no point since we're all going to die one day anyway. This hypothetical of hers does not bear out in reality.
And the absolute despair that sets in when you take away even the tiniest naïve hope in a better life to come -- I can't breathe with it. A vivid example: I'm vegan because I am acutely aware of the horrific suffering of factory farmed animals. More than 200 million land animals were killed today (include sea creatures, and you're looking at nearly 3 billion today). Every day. More than 30 billion have been killed in the US since January as of this writing (7/21/21). The vast majority of them are bred into existence purely to kill them once they're large enough to slaughter, or kept to reproduce in the most vile, horrific conditions the mind can possibly imagine. No matter how strictly vegan I am, no matter how many people I successfully convince to go vegan, another 200 million died today. And tomorrow. And the day after. And likely for a long time to come.
Even with the wildest hope that there could be something after death for those beings we destroy, living with the knowledge of what we as a species does every day is agony of a very particular kind. To deny the possibility of something more after this life, on what seems more to be a reaction to major monotheisms on her part, would invoke in me a rage so fantastic, I could see myself going down a very dark road to stop at all costs those people who take the lives of those billions we slaughter every year. Very little stops me now.
And that's another thing that bothers me about Carol's writing: she was acutely aware of women's suffering, but not of animals'. It's wonderful that she was such a strong feminist, and that she did what she could to help create change is equally wonderful. But even with her philosophy, even with her belief in all things as Beings, and a Someone rather than inert matter, she still talks of eating animals. She describes herself eating fish in some lovely little village in Greece, but she should have been aware at least of the horrific effects the fishing industry alone has on the ocean, through trawling, accidental death of other species tangled in nets and abandoned fishing gear, never mind the pollution that accompanies these massive ships -- on the ecological level, at least, which she seemed to be so passionate about, she should have been very much against eating seafood. This is before we even consider the terror, pain, and loss of life that accompanies every fishing trip so she can talk of 'enjoying life' the way she claims deity wants all of us to do. That this never appears to have crossed her mind, that the subjugation and murder of those who do not want to die is permissible in the pursuit of enjoying life as a human -- especially as there is a good argument that when humans can rationalize the subjection of animals, we can rationalize the segregation of humans in a similar way, so that it is possible for the degradation of women, of people of colour, and further to those who merely think differently or believe differently to happen in the first place -- bothered me most throughout this book.
Carol didn't really go into depth on why exactly it is necessary for process philosophy to dismiss the idea of life after death. She gave brief glimpses, such as saying modern science doesn't think there is anything, and again when she discussed NDEs (near death experiences, which she called "life-after-life" experiences, which was cringey, I don't care where she cited it from). Interestingly, she insisted that those who experienced NDEs were still embodied, and therefore we cannot know anything about what comes next even though I'm pretty certain there are NDEs from people who were quite dead before coming back to us. And while I do not give much truck to past life regressions either, she was more willing to dismiss past life regression as possibly tapping into someone else's memory (just say you don't think they're real, rather than coming up with something even more ridiculous, hey??). It really seems to be more that she saw all these modern faiths she disagreed with believing in life after death, and so she was going to believe the opposite.
(Her insistence that the mind and the body are one continuum and completely inseparable = therefore, no afterlife, seems be from the same I'll-do-the-opposite drive -- after reading Doing Harm, I honestly cannot believe psychosomatic illness is in any way real though Carol does -- though I won't get more into that as this review is long enough as it is, good gracious.)
Each chapter also ended in the same fashion, proposing that perhaps the topic discussed in that chapter only came into being because it was somehow a result of rejecting the female body. Which -- no, a lot of the things she discussed did not. The idea of coming from a perfect place, an Eden, a time long ago where there was no sickness, suffering, or death didn't come from thinking women are dirty base creatures, it came from a natural inclination to think life 'shouldn't be this way,' that there must be something wrong for suffering and pain and death to exist now, so perhaps once upon a time those things didn't exist. The idea of a before time that was perfect now needs an Event that causes things to become the way they are now, and it is at this point that accretions over time occur, most visible in the idea that Eve ruined it for everybody by eating an apple. The hope for life after death is not because being born once from a woman 'wasn't good enough' as she writes (pg 208), but most likely arose from the obvious patterns in the world around early humans: spring follows winter, and trees that appeared dead burst back into bloom; later agriculture enforces this idea as each crop is cut down but the seed of that harvest grows again next season in new life. Hope that one day we would rise again like the grain, that we would come again into vibrant life like the trees, naturally translates into beliefs about life past death, even on the most base level that a species will continue even though members of it may die. She would have been better off making her argument on that level rather than trying to crowbar some misogyny angle into it, at least; but belief in afterlives is absolutely not just an invention of woman-hating faithful at any rate.
----
7/28/2021: Returning to add to this after reading The Return of the Dead: Ghosts, Ancestors, and the Transparent Veil of the Pagan Mind and nearly half of Living the Sky: The Cosmos of the American Indian to point out that her entire premise of nature or pagan religions accepting finitude coupled with the lack of afterlife is completely disprovable as even the most cursory look through history would have informed her. As Lecouteux pointed out in the book cited above, the introduction of Christianity was the first breakup of the family unit in that it broke the bonds between the living and dead family members. Dead family members were very much alive, returning from their graves to walk around at night or feast with each other in their burial mounds or to live in the mountains (which is a particularly widespread belief, seen in Native American, European, and Far Eastern cultures such as China, to my knowledge; likely in many more cultures as well). Funerals were described disapprovingly as joyous parties by bishops of the early conversion periods; not because Europeans were ecstatic their loved ones had disintegrated and become part of the earth, but because they had simply moved house, and now lived in the mound. Parties were held there, people went regularly to visit their beloved dead to update them on current events and to ask advice; dreams were seen as a communication between the dead and the living and were often deliberately sought for as answer to a problem.
The only examples I am aware of that are nature-based religions which also believe in a complete end at death would likely be modern paganisms and reconstructions with believers who are coupling modern science with their nature-loving path. Carol (deliberately?) obfuscated this through her writing, making it seem that the original beliefs were only later corrupted by big bad monotheisms who believed in heavens and hells, but the only real difference between monotheism and the earlier paganism was the idea that the dead went 'away' permanently to heaven or hell, no longer able to be contacted by the living. The pushback against this idea is what gives rise to the idea of purgatory, to praying for the dead, to the idea of sinners serving their terms in purgatory not in a specific location but as wanderers through the earth (see Lecouteux's book!), and why we have All Souls' Day in the Catholic Calendar.
It would seem then, at best, that Carol did not do any research into the old pagan religions of the past (even though she studied theology) and honestly, this kind of oversight is really inexcusable. While she presents a new idea of how to relate to the world, I would rather have seen an honest and factual depiction of the things she dismisses, if for no other reason than that readers could have also made the decision whether or not to dismiss them as she does. Very, very disappointed.
----
Another flaw that I feel is a pretty major one concerns the idea of the entire universe as the body of Goddess/God (as Carol referred to deity). As a logical extension of how we conceive of deity -- moving from tiny local deity that only inhabits our mountain/river/cave/etc., to larger locales, to becoming more transcendent as peoples move around, to eventually becoming a deity of all peoples rather than a few -- I could see a Goddess/God who is literally the universe or at least present outside of our home planet becoming the next commonplace in a space-age time where people were jetting off through the stars and setting up on other planets. But as people struggle right now to believe a deity who created the planet and everything on it could also care for them personally, a deity who is literally the ever-expanding universe would seem only to make that a more ridiculous proposal than Carol wanted to admit. In a universe this large, no matter how loving that deity is, could the suffering on one planet even register? This is, I think, where the idea of chosenness or the importance of Earth does a favor for the idea of a singular deity, though Carol hated the idea (but if Earth isn't somehow special, why else would the individual sufferings of beings on it ever be noticed by a Goddess/God that large?). And though she dismissed the idea of polytheism as being without underlying unity (though it nearly always did in history and often does in reconstructionist faiths today, where the many gods are descendants or aspects, etc. of a greater but distant deity considered to be the All or Originator), it could have come into her favor here also, perhaps where Goddess/God is somehow the embodiment of this planet in particular.
There was also the interesting tidbit brought up occasionally that process philosophy does, in fact, go against modern science as much as she proudly touted where it does align elsewhere, as she writes that process philosophy does not mesh with the idea that there was a beginning to the universe or a time before the universe existed. As modern science does agree that there was definitely a beginning (the universe would not be continuing to expand otherwise), process philosophy does stumble a bit here.
In the end, I didn't think she did justice by other modes of belief. As a Filiani, I don't see why belief in a transcendent Deity at the heart of things, with a more 'active' aspect as seen in the Daughter, is discarded as unworthy. That the Daughter became the literal fabric of the world is a belief in at least some Madrian thought and would mesh with Carol's vision of the universe as the body of deity, while the idea of a Deity who is both the loving, passive Ground of all things and the active, caring principle -- as well as the figure of the Dark Mother as the unknowable side of Deity while at the same time embracing darkness as part of deity as Carol wanted -- seems to blend many of the best aspects of several philosophies and faiths together in a very fine way. Her insistence that all humans/beings are differentiated individuals who are not ultimately deity didn't fit well with the idea that Deity is literally in all things, that the universe is the body of Deity: it seemed that as much as Carol tried to distance herself from monism, she still seemed to end up describing process philosophy as tending toward monist anyway. Put in other words, if the ground of all things is water, and the water is in all things, even if I am tea, you are coffee, and someone else is juice, we are individuals with our differences, but at some level the same -- water. If I understand monism correctly, I don't think process philosophy can really say it isn't monist.
This is a very long review for a fairly short little book, and quite a lot of words to say I didn't like it, but as Carol points out, philosophies are there to be discussed, to be shaped and molded and changed. Though she expects feminism to do the most when added to process philosophy, I think veganism would be an even better choice to see the greatest change and most compassion extended to truly all beings, though that is swapping one controversial movement for an even more controversial one!, and I think process philosophy falls dearly short on many of the aspects of life (such as hope) that I feel are the heart of any philosophy that hopes to reach a large number of people. This re-imagining of the divine made for some truly depressing reading the past few days that I need time to recover from; I think I will stick with those forms of belief Carol and her heroes found theological mistakes in, warts and all, for at least that way I can live, striving to make change happen -- and have hope for a better day. Even if that better day never comes, I need to have hope to continue. We all do.
July 28, 2009
A powerful imagining of a feminist religious view point and interesting direction for process philosophy, and the more pantheistic and less deist religions. Though a few sections might feel slightly repetitive, you feel as though you have to forgive Christ. After all she is very much introducing an entirely new way of thinking for most people, and without some repetition you feel as though even the brightest of readers might lose the vision she is pursuing due to simply not being used to the point of view that her ideas require. An excelent investigation, well worth the time and effort.
July 4, 2007
process theology rocks my world. this book is an excellent intro for anyone interested in envisioning the way G-d works in the world in a new way, and the discussion of G-d's limited power within this framework is one of the only potentially satisfying solutions to the question of evil I have encountered. An accessible easy read for anyone, whether or not you're well-versed in theological language, and especially good if you have an interest in a feminist approach.
August 23, 2020
See also my review of "A Pagan Testament." As with that text, this is another to file under Did Not Finish. My evaluation of the text mostly reflects my own waning interest in the topic, rather than the quality of the text itself.
January 7, 2021
A comprehensive re-engagement with process theology from a feminist perspective. At times a little laboured. Moments of personal story make this readable and invite fresh perspectives.
May 17, 2025
Wonderful
March 30, 2008
Carol Christ began looking into the feminine divine in world religions during her graduate school experience at Yale. In this book, she talks about the ideas of Process and Feminist Theology (or Thealogy) in a way that isn't too jargon-y and also laced with her personal spiritual journeys and thoughts. Really, there are some parts in this book that made me cry (in a good way).
April 27, 2009
I remember as I read this book how I was bursting with sudden understanding and a need to talk to someone about what I was reading. It resonated in so many ways while rocking my world and letting in more understanding. It was NOT a comfortable read. That's for sure. But there were moments of such astonishing clarity that I was astonished.
April 5, 2009
I read Christ's book, Diving Deep and Surfacing and it changed my life. This one is also good, though I find her strident feminism a bit much--and I'm a feminist! But it has been very helpful in suggesting alternate ways of viewing the Divine, something I need at present
March 1, 2013
This book was a great read. It took me a long time to read it. Very "heavy" stuff to think about. Carol Christ is, as always, very thought provoking.
December 24, 2022
Wonderful book on process, feminist theology / thealogy. The world is the body of Goddess/God and we're co-creating the world with the divine. What a nice thought!
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