From the 1993 Re-Imagining Conference:
Our mother Sophia, we are women in your image:
With the hot blood of our wombs we give form to new life.
With the courage of our convictions we pour out our life blood for justice.
Sophia-God, Creator-God
let your milk and honey pour out,
showering us with your nourishment.
From my reflections on the Re-Imagining Conference presented at Hamline University on Novemeber 1, 2018:
One reason the creative re-imagining of God as female has not taken hold in churches and synagogues is fear of paganism and the Goddess. The creators of the Re-Imagining Sophia ritual took great care to guard against this charge by connecting it to Bible and tradition. Commenting on the reasons for the backlash against the Re-Imaging Conference, Sylvia Thorson-Smith stated:
One was the liturgical use of the biblical image of Sophia – but blown up as evidence of Goddess worship. Second was the milk and honey ritual – an ancient part of early Christianity, but attacked as a pagan substitute for communion.
While I understand her reasons for doing so, “the lady doth protest too much, methinks.” Continue reading “Challenging Christian Feminists to Re-Imagine the Goddess by Carol P. Christ”
I had a startling experience in church recently. It was Father’s Day, and the pastor was talking about how “God is our heavenly Father.” For the first time in 17 years, that idea held some appeal to me. But no sooner did the thought enter my mind, then it was ripped away by the realization that my church will never allow me to symbolize the divine as a “father.”
In the ancient world, snakes represented fertility, creativity, rebirth, wisdom and, even, death. They were often closely connected to female goddesses, priestesses and powerful human females who were the embodiment of such powers. For example, there is the Minoan goddess/priestess holding the two snakes in her outstretched arms. She is closely linked with fertility and domesticity. Similar figurines, with similar associations and dating to approximately 1200 BCE, have also been founded in the land of what once was Canaan, where Israelites also lived. Medusa, in whose hair lived venomous snakes, turned men who looked at her to stone. Ovid’s account of the creation of Medusa credits the Greek goddess Athena with Medusa’s lively hair. Another Greek legend says Perseus, after killing Medusa, gave her head to Athena who incorporated it into her shield. Athena, the goddess of wisdom, is portrayed often with snakes wrapped around her as a belt and/or on the floor next to her. 
It is quite common, I think, for Jewish feminists to gravitate to the first creation story of Genesis/Bereshit as an example of human equality but struggle to claim this same passage as an example of the goodness of embodiment. Genesis/Bereshit 1:27 reads, “So G-d created humankind in the divine image, in the image of G-d, the Holy One created them; male and female G-d created them.” In this passage, we have not only equality between men and women, in direct contrast to the second creation story, but also a description of human nature.
As my life ambles along, some things change, some things are surprisingly persistent. As a young person, the last thing I would have predicted about my future would have been developing even a mild interest in sports, but now I have a mild interest in sports. Mild, but there. So, that’s a surprise element in my life story. But while developments arise, I’ve found that in the growth of my faith, the word “God” has settled into all the movements of my being, taken root in my bones, provides many well-worn neural pathways that make the day go on. It sometimes seems like it would be easier to let the word go for the sake of communicating with a culture that turns more and more to science for cultural coherence, but the word “God” is as there in my psyche the laptop is there beneath my fingers.
When Merlin Stone’s book, 
Most days I am not certain that anyone really cares about what happens to girls. As a mother of a soon-9-year-old daughter, this burns me.
The end of my Ph.D. program is in sight. Originally, in 2004, I came to Boston University School of Theology (BU STH) from Los Angeles for a two-year masters program. Along the way I switched to a three-year masters program, after which I ended up staying for the Ph.D. Now, eleven years later, the end is actually in sight.
