Episode 47: WomanSpirit Rising, edited by Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow

The Editors

Carol Patrice Christ was born to a Protestant Christian family, in California in 1945. She obtained her PhD from Yale University and has served as a professor in universities such as a Columbia University and Harvard Divinity School. Her best-known publication is “Why Women Need The Goddess,” which was initially a keynote presentation at the “Great Goddess Re-emerging” conference at the University of Santa Cruz in 1978. This esssay helped to launch the Goddess movement in the United States and other countries, and it discusses the importance of religious symbols in general, and the effects of male symbolism of God on women in particular. Christ called herself a “thealogian” with an a—”thealogy” is derived from Ancient Greek θεά (“theá,” goddess) + logy. Her work has helped to create a space for the field of theology to be far more inclusive of women than has historically been the case. Before she passed away recently, she was the director of the Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual, where she conducted pilgrimages to sacred sites in Greece (mostly Crete, as listeners will remember from our episode on The Chalice and the Blade by Riane Eisler), and she lived on the Greek island of Lesbos, which was the home of the poet Sappho.

Judith Plaskow was born to a Jewish family in New York in 1947. As a teenager, Plaskow dreamed of becoming a rabbi, even though women rabbis were unheard of and opposed by many, including her own rabbi. However, even she had reservations: she wasn’t absolutely certain that she believed in God. Plaskow says that her life changed one day on Yom Kippur, when she realized she could get a doctorate in theology instead. Had she become a rabbi, she would have been only the second ever female rabbi, but she says she was “born a theologian” and made the right choice. Plaskow earned her PhD at Yale University, where she and Carol Christ met and became friends. She taught at Manhattan College for 32 years before beoming a professor emeritus, and helped create and edit the Journal for Feminist Studies in Religion. She also helped to create B’not Esh, a Jewish feminist group, and a feminist section of the American Academy of Religion. Plaskow’s work has been extremely important in developing Jewish feminist theology. Her most significant work, Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective, argues that the absence of female perspectives in Jewish history has had a negative impact on the religion, and she urged Jewish feminists to reclaim their place in the Torah and in Jewish thoguht. It is one of the first Jewish feminist theological texts ever written, and is considered by some to be one of the most important Jewish texts of the 20th century.