Read-a-thon, y'all

12:38pm Florida time: progress in Weaving the Visions=page 138. Progress in First Rider's Call=page 40.

Weaving the Visions is excellent. A few passages I found striking below:

"God as Mother", Sallie McFague: "If we are, then, to be concrete, personal, and nonidolatrous in our talk about God, we have no alternative but to speak of God in female as well as male terms, to use "she" as well as "he", and to realize that in so doing we are not attributing passive and nurturing activities to God any more than we are attributing active and powerful activities. Or to say it differently, we are attributing human qualities: we are imaging God on analogy with human beings, and so far that is all wea re doing: God is she and he and neither."

"The Power of Anger in the Work of Love", Beverly Wildung Harrison: "The important point here, however, is that a theology that overvalues static and passive qualities as "holy", that equates spirituality with noninvolvement and contemplation, that views the activity of sustaining daily life as mundane and unimportant religiouosly...could not have been formulated by women." (italics in original)

"Uses of the Erotic", Audre Lorde: "We have been raised to fear the yes within ourselves, our deepest cravings...to suppress any truth is to give it strength beyond endurance."

Weaving the Visions is really excellent. It's an older anthology (published in 1989 and updated from a previous anthology, Womanspirit Rising, published in the 70s) but it has some very choice essays that don't read as dated. As a committed feminist agnostic with a booknerd's interest in mythology and pagan religions, this anthology is like soul food. It's pleasantly balanced--some of the essays focus on Christianity, some on Judaism, some on neopagan systems, some on Native American or Afro-Caribbean or Asian traditions--and some of the ideas are downright radical, even for today (I mean...let's face it: we haven't really progressed much, as a society, as far as religion goes since the 80s).

I should be finishing this text sometime this afternoon (as I will be avoiding the mountain of papers to be graded). Then, onto First Rider's Call in earnest! Happy reading, everyone.