The Book of Kells - The four evangelists

Professor of Religion. Ph.D., Emory University. Her teaching focuses on contemporary religious thought, especially feminist and liberation theologies, and religion and art, including contemporary fantasy literature, film, and popular culture.  Mara Donaldson, Ph.D. donaldsm@dickinson.edu Office: East College 207 Phone:  717-245-1228 Fax: 717-245-1683

Celie, tell the truth, have you ever found God in church? I never did. I just found a bunch of folks hoping for him to show. Any God I ever felt in church I brought in with me.
- Shug, The Color Purple

    

Call [religion] what you like. All that stuff to me is just bad sex.
- Frank, Equus

Description
 

This course examines the dynamic relationship between religion and culture and the questions which emerge from that exploration. What impact has culture had on the ways in which we think about religion? Are people universally religious, or are we religious because of our particular cultural contexts? When are we more religious: when we attend services, watch a beautiful sunset, or feed a hungry child? We will use fictional and non-fictional narratives, popular films, and the works of scholars who have influenced the ways in which we currently think about and study religion in our modern (and increasingly postmodern) time.

Objectives

1. To provide students with a vocabulary and a range of alternatives for understanding the dynamic relationship between religion and culture (readings, lectures, tests).

2. To encourage students to examine and reflect upon their personal and community assumptions about religion and to make connections between what we are learning in class and relevant issues in the community (group projects).

3. To help students define their own positions on the questions raised in class, after having examined their assumptions and having reflected upon the alternatives (discussions, essays).

Elie Wiesel, Night
Paul Tillich, Dynamics of Faith
Peter Shaffer, Equus
Mircea Eliade, The Sacred and The Profane
Mary Crow Dog, Lakota Woman
Selected articles (Book of Readings--BR)

General Course Requirements

1. Overall participation--25% Includes:

a. Regular attendance (no more than two absences);

b. constructive participation in class discussions and activities (coming to class having read and thought about the assignment; asking questions when you do not understand the material; offering answers even when you are unsure that yours is the "right" answer or when you are afraid of what others might think; and listening without judgement to positions different from your own);

c. participating in one group presentation (the class will be divided into teams. Each team will design a project related to religion and culture (e.g., surveys of religious attitudes on the Dickinson Campus; interviews with local clergy; contemporary musical collage) which it will present at the end of the semester.

2. In Class Test--25%

3. Three Essays (3-5 pages typed)--50%

4. Policy on late papers: Except in the case of verified illness or other major verified emergency, a paper which is handed in latte cannot receive a grade higher than the lowest grade given to any paper which was handed in on time.

5. In order to receive a passing grade for the course, students must satisfy all of the general requirements for the course, including consistent attendance, written assignments, tests. It is your responsibility to keep me informed about unusual circumstances that come up which affect your performance in the course. I welcome the opportunity to continue conversations with you outside of class and via e-mail and expect you to have an active e-mail account. Please do not hesitate to come by and talk with me if you are struggling in the course.

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RELIGION 211: RELIGION AND FANTASY
 

To lose your love of fairy tales is almost as terrible as to lose your sense of religion. Indeed, at bottom, it is very much the same thing, for religion and fairy lore alike spring from a sense of reverence and a sense of wonder in the face of the unexplored and unexplained mystery of life. -Selma Lanes, Introduction to The Wizard of Oz
 

Description:

This course explores the religious and mythological dimensions of traditional and modern fantasy literature. Our explorations will be guided by our study of such religious themes as the nature of the divine, free will and predestination, the problem of evil, and the nature of the good; and of such mythological themes as the hero's quest and the nature of the self. We will read not only fictional narratives but also selected critical essays on theories of fantasy in our effort to decide whether or not fantasy literature can in C. S. Lewis's words, "baptize the imagination."

Required Texts:

Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Hobbit
C.S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces
Madeleine L'Engle, A Wrinkle in Time
Octavia Butler, Wild Seed
Ursula K. LeGuin, A Wizard of Earthsea

Course Guidelines:

1. Class participation--Includes:
(a) attendance and constructive participation in class discussions. Two absences allowed. Regular participation can raise borderline grades; poor participation can reduce the final grade.
(b) one "topics for discussion" on one of the required texts for the course--As you read the text, you are to imagine that you will be teaching the text to the class. Given the course what would you think was essential to cover (i.e., passages, questions, themes)? How would you assure a lively and thoughtful discussion? "Topics for Discussion" are due in my office by 5:00 on the Monday BEFORE we begin discussing the book
(c) Pass/Fall Reading Exercises (basic knowledge of plot, characters, themes) of the major texts of the course. As a general rule there are no make-ups on the Reading Exercises--25%

2. Take-Home Test on additional fantasy--25%-- Choices include: Peter Beagle, The Last Unicorn; Ursula LeGuin, Tehanu; George MacDonald, Lilith; Michael Ende, The Neverending Story

3. 15-20 page Term paper--50% (10% abstract and preliminary bibliography, 20%--Rough Draft; 30% Final draft). The specific assignment will be discussed shortly, but in general you are to write on a topic related to the course. I will meet with you at least once during the semester to talk about your ideas, and there will be opportunities in class to work with each other as peer editors.

4. Late paper policy--Unless you have made prior arrangements with me, late papers will receive no higher than the lowest grade of the papers turned in on time. *Mercy cards may not be used on the Final Draft of the Essay.

5. In order to receive a passing grade in the course a student must complete all of the minimum requirements, including maintaining regular attendance throughout the semester. Please keep me informed when you cannot be in class or if extenuating circumstances arise. Each student will be given a "mercy card" to be used in an emergency for "mercy" on one transgression (i.e., you forgot about a reading exercise; you need an extension on the bibliography).

RELIGION 250 SEX, SELF, AND GOD
Description

This course explores the interrelationship between sexual identity and spirituality in religious autobiography. How do the conversion narratives recounted by the authors transform their visions of themselves and of their work? Is gender a critical category in understanding religious autobiography or are there other more important factors, such as race, economics, culture that are more important? The readings in the course will consist of autobiographies and selections from each writer's work. These will be supplemented by a series of autobiographical writing assignments that students will do on their own spiritual journeys.

Required Texts

The Confessions of St. Augustine
Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis
The Autobiography of Malcolm X
The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day
An American Childhood, Annie Dillard
Waiting for God, Simone Weil
Xeroxed materials

Course Requirements

1. Attendance and participation--30%--includes regular attendance and constructive involvement in class discussions; two graded reading exercises, and one "discussion starter". Look over the syllabus and pick one of the autobiographies or works we are reading. Read the assignment, meet with your partners and think about what you would like to see the class discuss. Then meet with me to coordinate your presentation. You will be a discussion starter (as opposed to a guest lecturer/expert). You or your group's part should take approximately 10 minutes, with the rest of the class joining in after that. You will be evaluated on the basis of a) how well you prepare b) how well you consult with your partners and with me and c) how successful you are in generating relevant discussion with the class.

2. Test covering course materials and discussions--30%

3. Final paper--15 pages (no less than 13, no more than 20) on an autobiography we have not discussed in class. The focus of your essay should be on your own assessment of the relationship between sexuality and spirituality in the autobiography. Some research will be necessary. Late paper policy: If there is a problem with meeting any of the deadlines, TALK WITH ME AHEAD OF TIME. Otherwise, the essay will automatically receive no higher than the lowest grade in the class.

4. At least two autobiographical assignments--ungraded but necessary for completing the course. Each assignment should be typed and approximately 3-4 pages. The first assignment is required: answer the first question below. For the second assignment, choose one of the additional questions. Your autobiographies are confidential, tell me as much as you feel comfortable.

**a. Describe yourself when you were ten. Were you religious? What did you think of yourself? Then describe yourself now. Are you religious in the same ways? What do you think of yourself now?

CHOOSE AT LEAST ONE:

b. Who were/are the most important people in your spiritual journey? Why are they important?

c. What are two significant turning points in your understanding of the relationship between yourself and the divine?

d. When did you first become aware that you were a woman (or you were a man)? In what ways has religion encouraged or discouraged your sense of who you are as a woman or man?

5. In order to receive a passing grade in the course all requirements, including regular attendance throughout the semester, must be completed. Please keep me informed about any special circumstances that may affect your performance and participation in the course.

Mystics, East and West
Professors Cozort and Donaldson
 

Description:

Mystics, spiritual adventurers in quest of sublime religious experience, reenact the original mythic foundations of the Eastern and Western traditions of which they are a part. In exploring the writings of mystics the course seeks to address ongoing questions central to the study of mysticism. These include: how is it possible to talk about the ineffable? is mystical experience essentially the SAME experience, a kind or ur-religious experience, or does it DIFFER according to culturally defined paradigms? is mystical experience the ULTIMATE religious experience? Finally, what are the limits or dangers of mysticism?

Patanjali, How to Know God
Stephen Mitchell (trans.), Tao te Ching
Sekida, Zen Training
Thomas Merton, Life and Holiness
Meyerhoff, Peyote Hunt
book of photocopied readings (BR)

1. To introduce students to specific writings of mystics, traditional and modern, and thereby to introduce them to important aspects of a variety of religious traditions.

2. To encourage reflection on mysticism as a variety of religious experience (e.g., to develop a phenomenology of mysticism).

3. To explore with guests, films, and class exercises and discussions the experiential side of mysticism.

This is a seminar with two sections. The format for the course will vary, but in general each week we will meet separately and as a whole. Since we meet only once a week, it is imperative that you be present and prepared for each class. The sections will be subdivided into "reading groups." The following is our initial model for class meetings.

1. Each week the reading groups will meet separately for approximately 1/2 hour working with questions selected by the professors. (One person from each group is leader for that particular week)

2. Then we will gather as a whole and discuss for 1/2 hour to hour. The discussion will begin from the issues raised by the groups.

3. We will then break for 1/2 hour. Each week we will have refreshments. Professors will take the first week; students will sign up for other weeks.

4. After break, the professors will continue the discussion, give additional contexts for understanding the material. We may have guests, films, or class exercises to supplement the discussion.

5. After class, within 48 hours, students are expected to write an e-mail response to their section leader and section via an INI account (directions for setting up an INI account follow). You are expected to respond at least NINE times. You can send your message to the whole class if you wish. These responses are a great way to sum up what you got out of the discussion, to express something you didn't get a chance to say in class or only thought of afterward, to speculate about the connections between things, to raise questions, to ask others what they think, and so forth.

Requirements and Grading:

1. Participation. Your grade is established by exams, papers, etc., but may be reduced by as much as one letter for poor participation. "Participation" includes attendance, comments, attentiveness, discussion leadership, and e-mail responses.

2. In-class writing (each 15% of course total). We will give you time at the end of class to answer several questions based on the readings for the week and the class discussions.

3. A take-home essay -- 30% of course total.

4. A major paper on a research topic chosen in consultation with the professors. Possibilities include mystics not examined (or at least not examined in depth) in the course or the pursual of a cross- tradition topic such as mysticism and the arts, the politics of mysticism, a comparison of mysticism and madness, etc. 40% of course total (includes both oral and written). A "Paper Guide" will be provided.

Because we consider personal experience of mystical traditions to be valuable, we encourage you to participate in one or more of "mystical" opportunities that may arise during the semester and will allow you to substitute a writeup of your experience for one or both of the in-class writing exercises, although you must still complete the in-class writing assignments. For instance, Three Crows may conduct one or more native American sweat lodges this spring; students might organize a "meditation retreat" at Dickinson or other site; you might participate in a field trip to a Zen center and meditate there; etc. We will be glad to entertain your proposals and facilitate them when possible. In the write-ups we expect you to describe the experience and as best you can relate it to the issues and theories that we have discussed up to that point in the course.

Religion 250: Women's Ways of Believing

Spring 1999 Professor Donaldson, x1228, 249-6172; email–donaldsm

Office: East College 207; Office Hours–T, Th–2:00-3:00 and by appointment; sign-ups are on the board by my door, extra copies of handouts are outside my office.

Description

Scholarly interest in women and religion has exploded since the 1970s, as has research in women and gender more generally. This course explores this new field by 1) focusing on key figures and issues that emerged in the seventies as on-going areas of concern and 2) by examining in more depth three, especially lively areas of research–womanist theology, ecofeminism, and goddess spirituality (or thea-logy).

Texts (in the order we will read them)

Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow, Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion Diana Eck, Encountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Banaras Alice Walker, The Color Purple Katie Cannon, Black Womanist Ethics Rosemary Ruether, Women Healing Earth Carol S. Adams, Ecofeminism and the Sacred Carol Christ, Rebirth of the Goddess Cynthia Eller, Living in the Lap of the Goddess

Requirements

1. Participation (30%)-- The emphasis in the class will be on thoughtful reading and discussion of the assigned materials. Includes what goes on in class, on homework assignments, and whatever outside events you attend. Students are expected to come to class having read and thought about the readings and are responsible for all material covered in the course. You must keep up, even if you are absent. From Feb. 1–April 16-- Preparation will be enhanced by:

A. FFT--"Food for thought"-- each student will be responsible for choosing one quote and question from the day's reading for discussion. These will be posted to the class and to me by e-mail by Monday, 11:00pm.

B. Two types of responses:

1. RQQ–response to the quote and question–before class–Tuesday, 11:00am. 2. ACR–after-class response to me and to your group–Group A responds to the discussion by Wednesday, 11:00am; Group B responds to class discussion by Friday, 11:00am.

2. Take Home Test (30%)–due March 11

3. Creating a Women and Religion Bibliography and resource list (40%) A. Small group in-class presentation of recent research in Womanist theology, Ecofeminism, and Goddess spirituality. (15%)–for presentation when we discuss these areas

B. Final reflective essay and individual contribution to the bibliography. (25%)–due no later than May 7, 5:00pm.

4. Mercy cards–each student will be given one mercy card for one "goof"–can be used for one absence, one rewrite, or other emergency. Does not apply to the final reflective essay.

5. In order to pass the course, students must complete all requirements for the course by 5:00pm, May 7.

RELIGION 390: Interpreting Religion

FALL 1998 TUESDAY 2:00-5:00 P.M. ECLG 206 Professor Donaldson ECLG 207 — OFFICE HOURS: M, F 2-3 AND BY APPOINTMENT x1228 (249-6172) — DONALDSM@DICKINSON.EDU DESCRIPTION

This course is one of two required courses for a religion major/minor, and it is an excellent foundational course for any student interested in the academic study of religion. Its primary purpose is to introduce students to important theories and methods in the academic study of religion. We will ask such questions as

What do we study when we study religion? How do we study religion? Why study religion at all? It seems too private and personal or too public and universal.

Students also will learn to apply these theories to religious phenomena through class discussions and in writing assignments.

This is a writing intensive course; there are no tests or final exam. Rather, the class emphasizes the reading, speaking, and writing skills appropriate to the academic study of religion in a liberal arts setting.

OBJECTIVES

To learn what it means to think, speak, and write as scholars of religion. To introduce students to key ideas and vocabulary of both classical and contemporary theories and methods in the academic study of religion. To encourage creative and constructive application of the theories of religion to religious phenomena through class discussions and essays.

REQUIRED TEXTS

Daniel Pals, Seven Theories of Religion Rebecca S. Chopp., et. al. Horizons in Feminist Theology Thich Nhat Hanh, Peace Is Every Step Mary Oliver, House of Light COURSE REQUIREMENTS

OVERALL PARTICIPATION — (25%). PARTICIPATION INCLUDES Weekly preparation and attendance From Sept. 22- Dec. 2 informal e-mail comments to the class. By midnight on Monday, the day before the class, each person will send an e-mail to the class discussing an interesting passage from the reading or reflecting on a question they would like to discuss. Then after class — by midnight, Tuesday — each person will write a brief response to the day's discussion. Facilitating two class discussions during the semester — for one you will write a one page synopsis of the day's reading and make copies for the class; for the second you will verbally summarize the week's e-mails during class.

THREE ESSAYS — (75%). THESE INCLUDE

#1--Informal, eight pages — Due Sept. 22 (20%)

What have you always wanted to know about religion (but were afraid to ask)? This is an exploratory essay on a subject in religion that interests you. Identify the subject, tell why you are interested in it and what you would like to know about it. How has this subject been studied in religion? Spend two hours in the library using the reference tools that Mr. Moll introduced. Examine at least five different sources.

#2--Formal, analytical paper, ten pages — First draft due Oct. 13; final draft due Nov. 3 (25%)

Analyze the subject you choose in your first essay using any one of the methods we have discussed in class so far.

#3--Formal analytical paper, ten pages — First draft due Nov. 24; final draft due Dec. 12 (30%).

Use a second method to analyze the subject of your first essay or apply a second method to a new subject.

In order to receive a passing grade for the course, students must satisfy all of the course requirements, including maintaining consistent attendance during the semester. One absence is permitted. It is your responsibility to keep me informed about unusual circumstances that come up which affect your performance in the class. I welcome the opportunity to continue conversations with you outside of class, and I am eager to work with you to make the class a successful learning experience for you.

ASSIGNMENTS

1. SEPT. 8 GETTING STARTED — WHAT DO WE STUDY WHEN WE STUDY RELIGION? WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO "INTERPRET" RELIGION? Reading— Pals, 3-15; bring to class some small object that represents you in some way (we will use these objects in our introductions but do not show them to anyone when you come to class). Look over your schedules and decide on dates to sign-up for as facilitators and as snack bearers.

2. SEPT. 15 MEET IN LIBRARY FOR ORIENTATION WITH KIRK MOLL Discussion of assignment to visit a religious services.

3. SEPT. 22 ANIMISM AND MYTH--TYLOR AND FRAZER Reading--Pals, 16-53; concentrate on Frazer, pp. 30-47. Essay #1 due in class for discussion; discussion of visits to religious services.

4. SEPT. 29 SOCIOLOGICAL THEORIES--DURKHEIM Reading--Pals, 88-123; GUEST--Prof. Pulcini, ("A Lesson in Values Conflict: Issues in the Educational Formation of American Muslim Youth")

5. OCT. 6 PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES--FREUD Reading--Pals, 54-87

6. OCT. 13 PSYCHOLOGICAL THEORIES (CONTINUED) Reading--Thich Nhat Hanh, especially, 51-68; FIRST Draft of Essay #2 due in class

7. OCT. 20 3:30 Prof. Cozort -- ORIENTATION FOR HARE KRISHNA, GOVARDHAN PUJA, FIELD TRIP OCT. 21 HARE KRISHNA, GOVARDHAN PUJA, FIELD TRIP

8. OCT. 27 ANTHROPOLOGICAL THEORIES — GEERTZ Reading--Pals, 233-267

9. NOV. 3 PHENOMENOLOGICAL THEORIES—MIRCEA ELIADE Reading— Pals, 158-197 Final Draft of Essay #2 due in class

10. NOV. 10 THEOLOGICAL THEORIES — CHRISTIAN FEMINIST THEOLOGY Reading--Introduction, Horizons in Feminist Theology chapter. 2-5 11. NOV. 17 THEOLOGICAL THEORIES — JEWISH FEMINIST THEOLOGY Reading--Chapter 9, 154-164; Guest--Prof. Lieber

12. NOV. 24 FIRST DRAFT OF ESSAY #3--PEER REVIEW IN CLASS

13. DEC. 2 AESTHETIC THEORIES Reading--Mary Oliver, House of Light

14. DEC 9 CONCLUSION Reading— Pals, 268-284

Final Draft of Essay #3 due Dec. 11

Teaching FIELD OF DREAMS as Cosmogonic Myth Mara E. Donaldson Dickinson College

Trotting away from the camera, the boundary between baseball diamond and surrounding corn visible in the distant outfield, Shoeless Joe Jackson, himself part of American baseball myth, turns to ask: "Hey, is this heaven?" "No," replies Ray Kinsella, who has turned part of his farm into his field of dreams', "It's Iowa." Both the line and the movie from which it comes, FIELD OF DREAMS (1989), have become a staple in my "Religion and Modern Culture" course, providing a teachable occasion for linking popular culture, the religious category of myth, and the task of critical thinking in religious studies.

Not only is FIELD OF DREAMS familiar to most of my students, but it works well in class because it exhibits many of the characteristics of Mircea Eliade's discussion of sacred space in THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE. In contrast with the apparently transparent meaning of the film, Eliade's text is opaque to the class from the start. Sentences like "the manifestation of the sacred ontologically founds the world" (21), as well as his use of foreign words and comparative examples baffles and confuses students with little background in philosophy or religion. Their immediate response to Eliade runs from criticism, to hostility, to derisive dismissal. FIELD OF DREAMS, a familiar artifact of popular culture, becomes the occasion for the class to take Eliade's unfamiliar language and analysis and see BOTH how the film makes Eliade more intelligible AND how Eliade teaches them to think more critically ABOUT--rather than merely be critical OF--the religious category of myth', and its applicability to the world around them.

I try to help students see the metaphorical relationship between the film and Eliade's analysis of sacred space. The scene that I show, lasting about ten minutes, is divided into two sequences--the first is set in the profane space inside the house, and the second in the sacred space of the baseball field. The clip begins with a young girl, Karen, watching baseball on TV; her parents Ray and Annie sit talking about their impending bankruptcy. Their concern with mortgages and finances preoccupy them with what Eliade calls the desacralized world' (13)-- cornfields and bank payments, the profane world.

Karen interrupts, saying, "There's a man out there on the lawn." Ray leaves the house and steps onto the liminal space of his porch. Because Ray has heeded a voice saying, "If you build it he will come," this otherwise sensible farmer has plowed up a large section of the family cornfield to construct a baseball diamond, complete with lights. As he flips on the diamond's lights to see who is there, they frame the entire baseball field on which stands a lone figure--an ordered cosmos' of light beyond which lies the chaos' of the boundless midwestern cornfield (30).

Ray enters the field and starts to play ball with the figure, whom he discovers is the long dead Shoeless Joe Jackson, banned for life from baseball as a member of the legendary Black Sox' team of 1919, who allegedly fixed a World Series game. The appearance of Shoeless Joe I suggest can be seen as what Eliade calls a hierophany, "an irruption of the sacred that results in detaching a territory from the surrounding cosmic milieu and making it qualitatively different" (26)--the sacred, "the only REAL, and REAL-LY existing space" (20).

Ray, who has been batting, now reverses positions with Jackson, and takes the pitcher's mound. The camera offers a low shot of Ray on the mound, showing it to be the field's elevated center', around which Ray has constructed--or in Eliade's words provided an orientation' for-- this sacred cosmos (29). Not really an AXIS MUNDI (38), it nevertheless, orients Ray and the viewer in this world, this IMAGO MUNDI (52f.). The ritual of the game is a recreation of the cosmogony. And the film in its entirety, I suggest to the class, can thus be seen as a sort of cosmogonic myth, showing "how a reality came into existence, whether it be the total reality, the cosmos, or only a fragment" (97).

Shoeless Joe makes it clear how real this world was to him, what a sacred' thing it was to play this game, to do this creative', cosmogonic task. Statements such as "Getting thrown out of baseball was like having part of me amputated," or "Man, I did love the game," and "Shoot, I would have played for nothing," indicate that for him, as for any religious' person, the sacred is more than a place; it is a way of being oriented in the world.

If the edge of the cornfield serving as the outfield fence demarcates the boundary of the sacred (a boundary that Shoeless Joe can cross at will, indicating the kinship between the sacred and the power of chaos), on the home plate' side of the field lies the boundary between the sacred and the profane world, a line that Shoeless Joe cannot cross. Thus he must refuse the offer of a cup of coffee, prompting Karen in her innocence to ask "Are you a ghost?" to which he responds with a question of his own: "What do you think?" "You look real to me," Karen responds. Shoeless Joe concludes, "Then I guess I'm real"--in fact, the most real', that is, most sacred' figure on the screen at the time.

In a final long shot with the house out of focus and Shoeless Joe heading into the corn field, he turns and asks the question with which I began above, "Is this Heaven?" to which Ray answers "No, it's Iowa". The American heartland' is thus redescribed as sacred center'. The scene which began with the profane world and its financial worries ends with Ray and Annie reaffirming their commitment to keeping this field, AT ALL COSTS. For it has been seen as it really' is, a sacred space, indeed the very center of what matters most.

By using this film clip in class, I can work inductively to let the familiar and the unfamiliar reinterpret one another, showing how students' initial criticism of Eliade can be transformed into an appreciation for the kind of critical thinking that THE SACRED AND THE PROFANE engenders. Having read Eliade, then watching this film clip, students now have both new intellectual tools and a concrete example of how and why they matter in making sense of the popular cultural world in which they spend their time. When the exercise works, students suddenly see Eliade everywhere; with the enthusiasm of new religious converts' they see the sacred and profane, the axis mundi, and liminal spaces in virtually everything they do--in the choices of their seats in the classroom, in other of their favorite sports. This provides the chance to talk, then, about the LIMITS of using popular culture in the classroom as well. There are important differences between the movie director's view of sacred space and that of Eliade. And the class can think, too, about the difference between the medium' of text' and that of film'. Yet, most of all, they have an opportunity to see that Eliade's analysis of sacred space is less strange than it first appeared. Indeed, they come to appropriate the analytical tools as a way of thinking critically about the film and about other examples of sacred space, and they develop a confidence and competency with a bit of the discourse of comparative religion as well.

Bordercrossing: Fall and Fantasy in Blade Runner and Thelma and Louise Mara E. Donaldson Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA 17013

In Adam’s Fall We sinned all. (New England Primer)

For the oppressed, the problem is not defining limits, but defying limits. (Marjorie Suchocki)

1. Introduction

Writing on the importance of the Bible in American culture, novelist James Dickey says ‘the Bible is buried and alive in us’. In it we find ‘the fabulous world we all have fallen from, and toward which we are always falling, not backward in time but forward toward that moment when each story ... will happen again’. This essay explores the third chapter of the biblical book of Genesis, the so-called myth of the Fall, as an example of what Dickey calls ‘the fabulous’, or what literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov has called ‘the fantastic’. I will examine this story in conversation with two of film director Ridley Scott’s (re)visions of this story of the Fall in his films Blade Runner (1982) and Thelma and Louise (1991).
Reading the third chapter of Genesis not as a story, however, about a falling away from original goodness, but as a ‘fabulous’ story of a transgression of limits one which I will argue is the paradigmatic bordercrossing in human existence I wish to understand how that narrative is affected by being told in the literary form of ‘the fantastic’. I will argue that the literary genre of ‘the fantastic’ which revels in that moment of hesitation, or interruption, at which point all logical interpretations are subverted is both the literary genre by which to interpret Scott’s two films and the key to understanding the way in which these two movies subvert our accustomed readings of the biblical Genesis text. Each film becomes an example of ‘that moment when [the biblical] story . . . will happen again’. More than mere retellings of Genesis, however, they become moments when the biblical story long buried in our culture comes alive again in each of us who hears it.
Just as the Genesis text needs to be read as fantasy, thus keeping alive a possibility of interpretation that otherwise would be lost, so too should these films be viewed through the lens of ‘the fantastic’, as subversive interruptions of our ordinary expectations. Blade Runner and Thelma and Louise, when viewed as examples of ‘the fantastic’, can be seen both to exemplify biblical themes from the Genesis narratives and to enact, or make possible, reinterpretations of the themes of Genesis that the biblical text itself sometimes seems to have lost the power to evoke.

2. An Overview of Blade Runner and Thelma and Louise

Our understanding of these two films as fantasy originates in the range of audience- and critical-reviews of Ridley Scott’s two provocative films. Although neither film was a box office success, each achieved a sort of cult status ( Kolb1991 : 132, 143; Schickel 1991: 52). Indeed, even viewers normally repelled by violence in film still rank these among their favorites films. Most critics have compared them to other movies of similar genres. So, for example, W. Russel Gray relates Blade Runner to other detective films (i.e., The Long Goodbye, The Big Sleep) (Gray 1991:71), and many other critics have noted the similarities between Thelma and Louise and buddy movies like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (Grundmann, 1991: 36).
It is curious, however, that no one has compared the ways these two films they reflect the trademark-themes of Ridley Scott’s work as a director e.g., encounters with limits, heroic journeys. Moreover, no one has made central to their interpretation of either film the biblical myth of the Fall which I would argue they revise and transform. Judith Kerman is one of the few even to notice that ‘the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden is an important subtext of Blade Runner.’ As she continues, ‘although one can argue the faults and merits of the film, its mythic level is amazingly well-integrated, especially the integration of a forties private eye story with a science fiction text which weaves seamlessly together themes from Frankenstein, Paradise Lost, and the Edenic Legend which both draw upon. (Kerman 1991: 3). And Bernard Scott is the only critic who has viewed Thelma and Louise in term of the biblical myth of creation (Scott 1994, 251-254).
Blade Runner was a controversial film even before its release. Leonard G. Heldreth notes that most early discussions concerned Scott’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, on which the film is loosely based (Heldreth 1991: 40). They also included, however, such basic issues as title, ending, and the question whether the main character, Rick Deckard, was fully human. (Kolb 1991: 141-143). Although Dick, the novel’s author, never saw the final release, he read and approved the way that the film developed. Today, the only edition of the film available on videotape is the director’s cut Scott’s own personally-edited version (1983) which has a much more ambiguous finale, significantly omitting the idyllic ending and voice-over of the commercial studio-release seen by theater- goers.
In summarizing critical responses to the film, William Kolb states that ‘audiences as well as critics were sharply divided because of the film’s extraordinary achievements in some areas, such as its ultra realistic future milieu, and its manifest failure in others, including character development and lackluster narrative (Kolb 1991: 132). Borrowing as it did from three genres- science fiction, horror, and the detective story it was called a ‘chilling allegory about man’s relationship to God’ (Bray 1982: 197), a ‘virtual textbook of self-conscious, representational games’ (Boozer 1991: 219), ‘diabolically absurd’ (Arnone 1982: 13), ‘grisly sadism’ (Collins 1982: 19).
The story is that of Rick Deckard, a hard-boiled Los Angeles detective in 2019. We learn from an opening scroll that androids, or replicants as they are now called, are employed Offworld on ships and space stations as slave labor. They are not allowed on earth; this is a border they are prohibited from crossing. Deckard’s specialty as a ‘blade runner’ a term whose precise meaning is never given is killing, or retiring, renegade replicants, a job with which he has become increasingly disenchanted. As the film opens, six replicants (advanced Nexus-6 models) have escaped and have returned, illegally, to earth. Deckard who begins the film describing himself as ‘ex-cop, ex-blade runner, ex-killer’ is coerced into retiring these six by Bryant, his police department superior, whose own intolerance is evident in his references to the replicants as ‘skin jobs.’ As Deckard begins his investigation of the renegade six, he meets and falls in love with one replicant, Rachel, an experimental model used by the Tyrell Corporation creators of all the replicants in existence for promotion and advertisement. In the end Deckard does his job as blade runner, but in the process, especially in his encounter with Roy Batty, the leader of the renegade group of replicants, comes to understand something of the complexity of what it means to be human.
In its crossing of genre boundaries and its concern with transgressing limits, Scott’s 1991 summer film, Thelma and Louise, was equally, if not more, controversial than Blade Runner. In the tradition of buddy romance adventures, road movies, outlaw films, and Westerns, Thelma and Louise both borrowed from and subverted these popular Hollywood genres. It has been called ‘the first movie I’ve ever seen which told the downright truth’ (Schickel 1991: 52), ‘a butt-kicking feminist manifesto’, ‘a betrayal of feminism’, ‘a turning point’ (Schickel 1991: 52, 53), ‘a male formula with female forms’ (Dowell 1991: 28)), and a ‘myth of female embeddedness’ (Scott 1994: 253). In responding to the charges that the film was gratuitously violent, screen-writer Callie Khouri protested that such comments were the result of a double standard. When men are violent in films, she argued, it’s considered ‘healthy fantasy,’ but when women are violent, ‘it’s a propaganda film.’ (Simpson 1991: 55). Critic Janet Maslin also noted that compared with other similar films released in the 1990s (e.g., Total Recall or Die Hard II), the violence in Thelma and Louise was mild. For example, she noted, In Die Hard II alone there were 264 violent deaths (Maslin 1991: 16), contrasted with one killing in self-defense in Thelma and Louise.
One of the most ironic aspects of the critical responses to Thelma and Louise has been that it has become a litmus test within the feminist community used to determine who is to be considered feminist and who is not. For example, Margaret Miles, who calls the film ‘a cautionary tale,’ argues that this is a women’s film an example of ‘Hollywood films about women aimed at a heterosexual female audience’ not a feminist film one ‘aimed at a wide range of women, including women-identified, women-loving, lesbian, and heterosexual women’ (Miles 1996: 146). She is also concerned that the violence of the film misrepresents real violence against women. ‘Thelma and Louise inverted social reality at a historical moment when the scale of domestic violence and rape was coming to public attention. Not only are 89 percent of all violent crimes committed by men, but many of them are committed against women’ (144). Although much of Miles’s discussion of popular American film in her recent book is helpful, her treatment of this particular film errs, I would argue, because it views the film realistically when it is better understood as fantasy or myth. As critic Leo Braudy points out in his review, ‘many of the more ridiculous attacks against the film took its assertions as somehow realistic arguments about women, men, guns, and violence. But however real Thelma and Louise may be, it’s not realistic.’ The violence ‘erupts within a hard-edged satire’ and moves out of ‘reality into myth’ (Braudy 1991: 28).
The story is of two women: Louise, an older, cynical waitress, and Thelma, her younger, naive friend. The film opens in present day Arkansas, as the two women plan a weekend away at a friend’s cabin. Thelma cannot tell her husband, Darryl, what she is going to do, because she fears his disapproval of her friendship with Louise; so Thelma leaves him a note with a meal in the microwave. On the way to the planned weekend hideaway, the women stop at a bar alongside the road; it is, after all, the beginning of a stolen time for relaxation. Things get out of hand. Later, as they are later trying to leave, Thelma is attacked by a drunken patron who attempts to rape her. Louise shoots and kills him in a moment full of rage at his actions as well as protectiveness of her friend all clouded by her memories of a similar attack she herself had suffered in Texas in the not too distant past. Refusing to go to the police, whom they assume will never understand what has just happened, the two women become fugitives, on a wild drive for supposed freedom in anonymity in Mexico. Pursued by local officers and by the FBI, along the way the two women become outlaws in the true sense of the word, as Thelma begins to rob convenience stores for money and provisions. Their journey ends in a standoff at the edge of the Grand Canyon, where they choose to drive over the cliff wall rather than turn themselves in to the law.
Despite their many similarities, no one has noticed that each of these films is centrally concerned with a transgression a bordercrossing that sets up the struggle for the moral existence of its characters. Read as variations and transformations of the biblical myth of the Fall, it is important to see the way that both of these films, when understood as fantasy, connect us back with the literary devices used in the biblical text itself. For like the biblical story of the Fall they are deliberately constructed in such a way as to interrupt and subvert the usual understanding of the transgression in which the characters are involved.

3. Genesis and the Fantastic

As biblical scholars and theologians explore the interplay between fantasy and biblical texts, Tzvetan Todorov’s writings on fantasy in The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre (1973) prove to be a rich resource for understanding the Bible as fantasy. For Todorov the genre of ‘the fantastic’ depends upon what he calls ‘that hesitation experienced by a person,’ for example, ‘ who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event’ (Todorov 1973: 25). The fantastic lasts only as long as this moment of hesitation; once such a character within a story, or the reader of the same text, decides on some rational explanation of the event, or decides to accept the possibility of the existence of the supernatural, the fantastic becomes either the uncanny or the marvelous (41). It is ‘fantastic’ only in that tensive moment of hesitation.
This genre of fantasy, according to Todorov, has three characteristics. First, there is this moment of hesitation or ‘interruption’. ‘The text must oblige the reader to consider the world of the characters as a world of living persons,’ says Todorov, ‘and to hesitate between a natural and a supernatural explanation of the events described’ (33). Second, the hesitation may be experienced by a character in the story, thus becoming one of the themes of the work (33). Third, ‘the reader must adopt a certain attitude with regard to the text’, an attitude in which both allegorical and purely figurative interpretations must be rejected (33). As Todorov summarizes the interplay of these characteristics in a typical fantasy, he describes their effect by saying ‘I nearly reached the point of believing . . . Either total faith or total incredulity would lead us beyond the fantastic: it is hesitation which sustains its life’ (31). The religious dimension of fantasy, therefore, is not beyond, but within this moment of hesitation and its ability to interrupt, and thus subvert, our expectations about the world. ’The shortest definition of religion,’ Johann Metz has quipped, ‘[is] interruption’ (Metz 1980: 171).
Todorov sees an intimate link between the structural character of the fantastic (the interruption or hesitation experienced in the moment of deciding between apparently mutually- exclusive options) and the thematic character of a work of fantasy. In being structured by this moment of hesitation for example between a rational and a supernatural explanation of a story ’he fantastic represents an experience of limits.’ (93) That is to say, the ordinary possibilities of interpretation the either/or of binary opposite possibilities is subverted. All reductionist readings are disallowed; there is no single possible interpretation, because the story, as fantasy, wants to say more than either of the interpretations allow. The fantastic resists being placed within the limits of two mutually-exclusive interpretations, for either of them would distort its fuller intended meaning as fantasy.
I am proposing to read the biblical narrative of ‘the Fall’ as an example of what Todorov had described as ‘the fantastic’ or fantasy. As Terry Otten has written, ‘like all enduring myths, the Fall offers truth but not dogma; it defines for us the nature of human experience, but it offers little to satisfy the rational mind in search of certainty... Irreducible in its richness, the story of the Fall demands formulation while it defies it’ (Otten 1982: 3). Thus to interpret the Fall story as fantasy helps to highlight the way in which the opaque moment which the tradition has defined as a ‘Fall’ can better be understood as a moment of hesitation and an experience of the transgression of limits (and limited possibilities) which I call a bordercrossing. Interpreting the third chapter of Genesis as an example of the genre of fantasy also holds open the question of the moral status of this moment of hesitation, refusing to prejudge it as a lapse or ‘Fall’ even holding open the question of what we are to make of the transgression of limits itself.
A good example in the third chapter of Genesis occurs in the encounter between the serpent and the woman. The sparseness of the Genesis narrative itself accentuates the dialogue between the two.
[The serpent] said to the woman, Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden? The woman said to the serpent, We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ But the serpent said to the woman, You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God knowing good and evil (vs 1b-5).
Confronted by the serpent’s misstatement of God’s expressed limit, Eve hesitates. Undecided about whether or not God said what the serpent has claimed, she responds to the serpent’s question by actually strengthening God’s prohibition, making the limits stricter than they were originally. For God had said nothing about not touching the fruit; this is her interpretation (Stratton 1995: 88).
This dialogue is followed by the woman’s deliberations: ‘So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate’ (vs. 6). In those deliberations she hesitates, neither herself knowing, nor allowing the reader to decide, what it is that should be done or how to evaluate the actions that she does indeed take. God’s response to the woman and the man six verses long as has been the telling of their deed succinctly states the consequences. Limits have been transgressed. The man and the woman have gained knowledge, but they have not yet died. God describes their plight, saying to the man, cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life (3.17). And God says to the woman, I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing: in pain you shall bring forth children yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you (3.16). God announces that both the woman and the man will suffer as a result of their deed; having lost their original goodness, their actions have banished them from paradise.
Once we recognize the importance of this moment of hesitation, it becomes clear how quickly and easily previous interpretations of this story have sought to escape the discomfort of this tensive moment. Either they choose to see this transgression of limits as humanity’s denial of it creatureliness, desiring in pride to ‘be like God’, for which humanity obviously deserves just punishment, or they choose to see this transgression as a regrettable but necessary step in the process of becoming fully human , a ‘happy Fall’.
It is interesting to note that however central the notion of a ‘Fall’ was to become in Christian theology, especially in the Pauline and Augustinian traditions, biblical scholars like Claus Westermann and Gerhard von Rad are right to point out that the term ‘Fall’ played no part at all in the original understanding of either the particular text of the third chapter of Genesis or the larger primeval history in which it is embedded. Westermann, indeed, sees the origins of the term ‘Fall’ in Judaism after 70 C.E. (Westermann 1984:275): ‘O Adam, what have you done/? For Though it was you who sinned,/the Fall was not yours alone,/but ours also who are your descendants’ (2 [4] Esd. 7.118). And in observing the absence of references to the entire story in the Hebrew Bible, von Rad states, ‘No prophet, psalm, or narrator makes any recognizable reference to the story of the Fall (von Rad 1972: 102). The absence of references in subsequent Jewish writings to the story of the garden of Eden and the Fall is one of the reasons that Jewish scholars have tended to regard Genesis, especially the mythological primeval history, as the least Jewish text in the Hebrew Bible. Indeed the term is not employed in the Christian New Testament either, the closest text being Paul’s usage of the word parapt ma (slip, or fall, sideways; a lapse) (Richardson 1950: 76) to speak of Adam’s ‘trespass’ which brought about the need for the ‘new Adam’, or Christ.
If ‘Fall’ is not originally part of the historical or cultural context of Genesis 2-3, where do we get the nomenclature of ‘Fall’ as a way of talking about the original disobedience of Adam and Eve and the results of this disobedience ? (Efrid 1985: 301). Three examples are instructive. Clearly, the use of the term ‘Fall’ is post-biblical, arising in Christianity primarily in the writings of Paul of Tarsus and his fifth century theological-successor, Augustine of Hippo. By employing such a term, however, each tends to avoid the tension narrated in ‘the fantastic’ story of Genesis, for each reads this story as an allegory about human sin and humanity’s redemption through Christ. As humanity all sinned in Adam, so all are redeemed in Christ. It was Paul who in his first letter to the Corinthians turned to the language of Genesis in order to describe Christ as this ‘last Adam’ (15.45) who rights the ‘Fall’ of the original Adam. It was Augustine, however, who gave the symbol of the Fall its full theological import. By way of explaining what was to become the Christian doctrine of original sin, Augustine stated in the City of God, ‘It was in secret that the first human beings began to be evil; and the result was they slipped into open disobedience. For they would not have arrived at the evil act if an evil will had not preceded it. Now, could anything but pride have been the start of the evil will? For pride is the start of every kind of sin ’ (Book xiv, sec. 13, 571). The fall of prideful human beings has left them bound by their sinfulness; only humble submission to a gracious God can free them from the effects of their original ‘Fall’ from grace. Centuries of Christian theological reliance on Paul’s and Augustine’s readings of the Genesis text have reduced it again and again to a single, univocal interpretation. There is no ambiguity, no hesitation, no tension; the text has ceased to bear its ‘fantastic’ import.
A second possible reading of the Fall interprets it as a reversal of center and limit or boundary, turning away from the theme of pride (which Augustine had not too subtly connected with the desires of the flesh in particular) to that of power. The Protestant theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer is one such voice who sees the story as about the necessary limitations of finite creatureliness, and the overweening human desire for power beyond that allowed within the limits of our finitude. Thus for Bonhoeffer, God’s statement of humanity’s limit a limit that stands, in the symbol of the tree, at the center of the mythic garden is a statement of the true center of human existence. As he writes in Creation and Fall, ‘The human being’s boundary stands at the center of human existence, not on the margin; . . . The boundary that is at the center is the boundary of human reality, of human existence as such (Bonhoeffer 1997: 146-147).
Here, limit is understood positively, a perspective, as Paul Ricoeur states, that humanity, for all its progress, has lost. ‘We no longer know what a limit that does not repress, but orients and guards freedom, could be like; we no longer have access to that creative limit. We are acquainted only with the limit that constrains’ (Ricoeur 1967: 250). The essence of the Fall for a theologian like Bonhoeffer is that the boundary has been transgressed. Now humankind stands in the middle, now it has no boundary. . . . With his boundary Adam has lost his creaturely nature (201, 202). The desire to be like God costs the creature its very humanity, its distinctiveness as a finite creation that is free to live, but only within its limits.
Augustine’s and Bonhoeffer’s readings of the Genesis text share a tendency toward a reductionist reading of ‘the Fall’ as a loss of creatureliness or one’s essential humanity; for both of these theologians such an interpretation exhaustively explains the meaning of the text, ending any moment of hesitation the reader might have about its significance. While their interpretations of the Genesis story are by no means of one mind, feminists such as Valery Saiving and Judith Plaskow (Saiving 1979: 25-42; Plaskow ?) however, have argued in common that to see the Fall as a matter of an excess of pride or power is to interpret this event only from an androcentric perspective; it makes this into a morality tale only about those with power and the ability to abuse it. Most importantly, such an interpretation offers only one possibility for redemption to renounce such pride, abdicate all one’s power, and humbly accept one’s lot within limits.
The feminist argument is simply that while this may be a helpful perspective for the ‘male-centered’ benefactors of the sins of patriarchy, it is not at all helpful either as a way of understanding the sin of the victims of patriarchy, or as a clue to what redemption from the abuses of patriarchy might look like. For the powerless to be offered redemption in the form of self-abasing powerlessness is not to be offered anything redemptive at all. As Marjorie Suchocki has said, for the oppressed the problem is not defining limits, but defying limits (32).
Two points need to be made about the importance of continuing to read the myth in the third chapter of Genesis as fantasy. First, it is possible to lose the central tension of the moment of hesitation we call ‘the Fall’ either by reducing the story to a cautionary tale about the sin of pride and the abuse of power or by simply turning the tables and arguing that the story is not about any ‘Fall’ at all, but rather about the necessary transgression of patriarchal boundaries in order for those oppressed by them to become fully human. This means that both the Augustinian reading of Genesis and many feminist readings of Genesis can easily become reductionist interpretations that lose the tension and mystery of the narrative. I would argue that either of these strategies misunderstands this text by making it into an allegory a story in which there is a one-to-one correlation between the text and its meaning rather than a ‘fantastic’ metaphor. To read this story as fantasy, as extended metaphor, is to refuse to try to step outside the tension in which both the woman and the man place themselves.
Despite this caveat, however, a second, and perhaps even more important point needs to be stressed about the way we read this story as fantasy. ‘The fantastic’ holds us within this tension, refusing us the easy way out, but always for a reason, always with an interest in the outcome. Fantasy wishes to discomfit us with the way things are; it is, as Rosemary Jackson has remarked, a ‘literature of subversion’. Thus, while multiple interpretations are required by fantasy, participating as it does in the irreducibility of the extended metaphor, there is what Paul Ricoeur has called a ‘weighted focus’ on those that subvert the dominant paradigm of the culture out of which fantasy arises. In the case of the feminist reading of Genesis, therefore, the subversion of androcentric pride and power must always be coupled with the use of this myth as a way of encouraging the victims of patriarchy to cross the boundary from oppression to freedom, from the sin-of-selflessness to the redemptive freedom of full humanity. The tension between the two is metaphorical; its result is far greater than the sum of its parts. Unless this is understood, then one is bound to miss the fact that this story, as Phyllis Trible writes, rather than legitimating the patriarchal culture from which it comes, . . . places that culture under judgment’ (Trible 1979: 81). To seek to escape the discomfort of the moment of hesitation in the story of ‘the Fall’ is to lose the significance of the story as a critique of the status quo and as a word of hope and comfort to those oppressed by it.
For example, the words spoken by God to the man and the woman cannot be taken within the dynamics of a patriarchal culture, then or now with equal gravity. God’s words to the man, that cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life (3.17), may indeed have to do with the man’s pride and desire for dominant power, a desire that turns against him and is experienced as a curse. When God, however, says to the woman, I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing: in pain you shall bring forth children yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you (3.16), this cannot be interpreted in terms of pride or power at all. For if the man’s sin of pride and power costs him his creatureliness, then redemption for the man will have to do with overcoming his concupiscence and accepting the appropriate limits within which he has been created to live. If the woman’s sin, however, is not overarching pride and power, but the acceptance of her oppression and the denial of her own humanity, then the words of malediction spoken to her by God must be seen as the consequence not of pride but of self-negation and denial. Redemption for the woman, then, must have to do with the overcoming of her limited and limiting relationship with the man. She is not who she has been created to be so long as she submits to the limits of her oppression, to the boundaries of patriarchy. To be God’s creature, to be redeemed as a human being, requires a bordercrossing, a transgression of the limiting and oppressing and oft times violent boundaries of any male-dominated culture.
Unless we can read the expulsion from the garden as fantasy, holding onto the moment of hesitation, then we will miss grasping the way in which this particular verse, as Beverly Stratton and others have pointed out, has been used to sanction male domination over women. As Stratton states, Interpretations matter. They mattered in the garden of Eden and they continue to matter outside the garden as well. Interpretations of the Adam and Eve story, in particular have affected women’s lives for centuries’ (11). As Susan Lanser has observed, this verse unravels the argument, for it refuses to allow us easily to explain why male dominance should be the particular consequence of a transgression for which both man and woman are equally, as they argue, responsible’ (Lanser 1988: 75). Here, then, at the level of interpretation, the reader, as well as the characters themselves, hesitates; as fantasy, the text has done its job.

4. Fantasy and Bordercrossing in Blade Runner and Thelma and Louise

At times over the two millennia of Christian history, the biblical stories have exerted a profound, but largely unilateral, influence on human literature and art, Milton’s Paradise Lost and Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel ceiling being only two of the most enduring examples. At other times, art and literature have themselves provided stirring rendition of the very biblical themes, such as Dante’s virtual creation of western culture’s visual imagery of heaven and hell in the Divine Comedy or William Blake’s drawings which evoke a level of interpretation of the book of Job heretofore unimagined (Otten 1982; Manlove 1992). What usually goes less noticed is the way the biblical texts continue to shape, and to be reinterpreted by, not only ‘high culture’, but popular cultural forms such as fantasy. As I have argued elsewhere, at its best fantasy literature has not merely exemplified or illustrated biblical genres, but has enacted them in the contemporary world in a way that the Bible itself sometimes no longer seems capable of doing. That is to say, fantasy literature at its best has provided occasions in which the biblical themes themselves become present cultural events’ (Donaldson 1992: 115). In so doing, such popular cultural expressions serve to hold open that moment of hesitation that is characteristic of fantasy, demanding of us the multiple levels of interpretation that refuse any reductionist solution.
These two films offer just such a subtle retelling of the Genesis story. For the seemingly central theme of boundaries-unjustly-overstepped is more than balanced by the theme of borders-crossed in order to be human at all. Reminiscent of the theological legacy from Irenaeus to Paul Tillich, they refuse to see ‘the Fall’ as centrally a matter of pride, but rather as a matter of a necessary ‘Fall into existence’. What is striking about both films, moreover, is that the ‘bordercrossing into full humanity’ must overcome cultural obstacles and oppression the boundaries of slavery and the intolerance of ‘the other’ in Blade Runner, and the boundaries of patriarchy and androcentrism in Thelma and Louise.
In Blade Runner there are a number of ‘transgressions’ that, like the transgression in the biblical garden scene, beg to be interpreted not as ‘Falls’ but as ‘bordercrossings’ ambiguous ruptures of limits and boundaries, whose meaning remains metaphorical, multivalent, and resistant to reductionist readings. Deckard himself is involved in two of the three most important bordercrossings in the film. First, he is coerced into the task of retiring a group of replicants precisely because they already have crossed the boundary between outer space (Offworld) and earth. And, second, in the process of coming to know and to love Rachel, herself a replicant, Deckard realizes that the lines between human being and android are not so clear. At one point in speaking about Rachel, but clearly referring to himself as well, he says, ‘How can it not know what it is’?
In this second scene, as Deckard first discovers that Rachel is indeed a replicant, we have one of the clearest examples of the way in which the film needs to be interpreted as fantasy. Rachel is Tyrell’s assistant, and she obviously thinks that she is human. At Tyrell’s insistence, and as a test of the Voigt-Kampff test which the police use to determine if subjects are really human, Deckard queries Rachel. As the examination proceeds, she begins to hesitate in her responses. When Tyrell asks her to leave after its completion, Deckard confronts him, asking that crucial question, ‘How can it not know what it is?’ Tyrell responds, ‘they give them memories.’ In this case, Rachel has been given the memories of Tyrell’s niece, and when she shows up at Deckard’s apartment later that evening she brings her ‘family’ photographs. ‘You think I’m a replicant, don’t you,’ she asks? The fact that she has been given memories begins to erode Deckard’s own sense of the boundaries between human and machine. The boundaries are further eroded when they become lovers later in the film.
The third Bordercrossing at the heart of the film involves not Deckard but the replicant Roy, who of all the androids is the one most tempted to try to achieve immortality, or at the least a life-span longer than his creator, Eldon Tyrell, has permitted. The encounter between Roy and Tyrell, his creator, clearly links this film to the biblical Fall narrative, with its themes of disobedience and violence. When Roy arrives at Tyrell’s home, wishing to change his termination program, the scene is staged in deliberately ecclesiastical style. Tyrell wears what appears to be a papal gown; devotional candles light the room (Kolb 1991:166). Tyrell, however, cannot do as Roy demands. ‘You were made as well as we could make you... The light that burns twice as bright, burns half as long.’ ‘I’ve done questionable things,’ Batty confesses. Tyrell responds, ‘Also, extraordinary things. Revel in your time’. The scene ends as Batty kisses his creator, but then crushes Tyrell’s head and eyes.
Deckard’s own relationship with Roy during the final sequence of the film also needs to be seen through the lens of the fantastic. As Deckard is about to fall to his death with Roy standing over him, holding a dove, Roy says, ‘quite an experience to live in fear. That’s what it is to live in fear.’ Deckard falls and Roy reaches out and grabs Deckard’s arm. The camera holds this moment and then follows Roy as he pulls Deckard up onto the rooftop. Then Roy says to Deckard, ‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe . . . all those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain. Time to die.’ As Deckard watches him die, he speaks his first line in ten minutes: ‘I don’t know why he saved my life. Maybe in those last moments he loved life more than he ever had before. Not just his life. Anybody’s life. My life. All he’d wanted were the same answers the rest of us want. Where do I come from? Where am I going? How long have I got. All I could do was sit there and watch him die.’
As in Blade Runner, there are several crucial bordercrossings in Thelma and Louis, as well. The film chronicles Louise’s journey from being an independent, self-sufficient cynic much like Deckard across the border to becoming an interdependent, responsible moral self. At another level, however, this is more Thelma’s story, a transgression of the limits of a codependent wife, to the status of an active, independent self. Her relationship with Louise is of primary importance in Thelma’s transformation, but in her initial naivete and innocence she reminds us of Rachel. Thelma’s awakening, like Rachel’s, is in part the result of a sexual coming of age; in this case Thelma’s partner is JD, a hitchhiker, whom she and Louise pick up on the road. JD, as in many traditional interpretations of the snake in Eden, is both the cause of her heightened sexuality and the reason Thelma is pushed over the boundary to become an outlaw. Because he steals the money Thelma and Louise have for the trip, Thelma has no choice but to steal. A petty thief himself, JD sees his former exploits as part of their sexual foreplay, telling Thelma how to rob without getting hurt or without hurting anyone else, both of which lessons she learns all too well.
Some of the boundaries in this film are literal; the women start in Arkansas and cross state boundaries, ending up at the Grand Canyon. And some of the bordercrossings are metaphorical; the women become more and more alike, as is shown visually in a scene in which the camera blurs the features of the women as they are looking at the night sky. The ending, a freeze frame of the car going over the cliff wall of the canyon, is itself a highly controversial bordercrossing between life and death, reminiscent of Roy and Deckard at the end of Blade Runner. On the one hand, it is clear that this is a traditional transgression of the taboo of suicide, and there is great regret that there were no alternatives for the women in a patriarchal culture. On the other hand, this final leap is a bordercrossing asserting their ultimate freedom and independence, much in the same way that African slaves walked to freedom and died rather than be enslaved.
The bordercrossings in this film help us to clarify further the way that the moment of hesitation the interruption in narrative flow functions in the literary genre of ‘fantasy’. Yet when we call such stories ‘fantasy’, as when one calls the Genesis story ‘myth’, this must not be allowed to suggest their ‘untruth’. Rather, the moment of hesitation central to fantasy is always for the sake of saying ‘more’ than the truth of a literal, reductionist reading of the story can tell.
For example, during the long road-odyssey of Thelma and Louise, the periodic phone calls between Louise and Hal, the sympathetic Arkansas policeman who is helping the FBI to track their movements, are classic cases of narrative interruption. Louise’s conversations with Hal start out to be brief. He tries to be sympathetic from the beginning, but as they continue their crime spree and refuse to turn themselves in, he is left little choice but to have them charged with murder.
After she has killed the would-be rapist in the tavern parking lot near the beginning of the film, Louise had refused to go to the police, and the viewer learns that her resistance has to do with something that had happened to her earlier in Texas. Louise’s intransigence on this point, her utter refusal to talk about it even with Thelma, has remained throughout the film an interruption in the flow of the narrative. It becomes clear only indirectly, by dwelling with the tension of this extended moment of hesitation, what had happened. Thelma, not Louise, is the one who finally names it. ‘It happened to you, didn’t it? In Texas. You was raped.’ Louise in fact never admits this is the reason she refuses to go through Texas. ‘I’m warning you, just drop it. I’m not going to talk about it.’ The tension remains, as does its power to drive forward the plot of the film.
In a crucial phone conversation, Hal tells Louise he knows what happened to her in Texas, and that he understands what’s making them run. Louise hesitates and Thelma tells her to hang up. When they are outside, she notices Louise’s hesitation and questions whether or not she is going to make a deal with the police. Thelma, however, states what has become true about herself. ‘Something’s like crossed over in me, and I can’t go back. I mean I just couldn’t live.’ And Louise replies, ‘I know what you mean.’
Throughout their journey, Thelma and Louise have followed a route that has been periodically interrupted by encounters with a trucker following the same itinerary they have. Just before the film moves into its denouement, the women meet the trucker for a third, and final, time. They stop, and in a scene mirrors the first shooting of the would-be rapist, Harlan, in the parking lot, they confront the trucker and his repulsive behavior his tongue wagging, his calling them ‘beavers’ over the CB radio. In words reminiscent of those she used with Harlan, Louise says to the trucker, pointing her gun. ‘You say you are sorry or I’m going to make you sorry.’ Then she hesitates and turns her gun on his truck, shooting its tires. Thelma also shoots, and the truck blows up in an apocalyptic blaze. This moment of interruption forces the viewer into an increasingly intense quandary about how to interpret this film, about the level on which one is take the journey itself, the violence, and their repeated crossing of virtually every socially- defined boundary of their culture.
Their final bordercrossing is also the most striking example in the film of the hesitation of fantasy. Faced with an army of FBI men loading and pointing their rifles, Thelma says, ‘let’s not get caught. Let’s keep going.’ Louise hesitates, then realizes what she means. They kiss, hold hands, and with Hal running on foot after their car, they drive off the edge of the canyon. The camera catches them mid air, where they hang in perpetual hesitation, interrupting and subverting the inevitable conclusion.

5. Conclusion

The biblical story of the Fall and the stories told by these two films all wish to say more than the sum of their partial possible interpretations. Reading and viewing them as fantasy has allowed us to bear with that moment of hesitation so characteristic of the fantastic. It allows them to subvert our desire for reductionist readings and viewings of these works of art.
Genesis, Blade Runner, and Thelma and Louise remind us that we are, as James Dickey put it, ‘always falling, not backward in time but forward toward that moment when each story . . . will happen again.’ Each confronts us with the question of what to make of the transgression of limits; each poses the potential virtue in refusing to rush to moral judgments about them.
One man’s transgression, we might say, is another woman’s bordercrossing. For as much as each of the films does indeed exemplify biblical themes from the Genesis narratives, they do far more than that. For they also wish to make possible, indeed they enact, ‘new’ interpretations of the themes of Genesis interpretations that the biblical text itself sometimes seems to have lost the power to evoke.
Understood as fantasy, each of the three stories we have examined has represented an experience of limits or boundaries. And each has shown in its own way the dangers for humanity of seeing life as exhausted by the extreme options of limitless-power, on the one hand, and powerless-subservience, on the other. Fantasy wishes to hold open for us the potentiality that these stories and indeed human existence itself has a fuller, richer meaning than either unbridled power or self-denying powerlessness can offer. Yet that possibility cannot be expressed merely as a combination of the two.
To employ power to transgress the fundamental existence of another person is to have crossed a boundary that human beings do well to respect. And to retreat from the experience of the violence of power into the apparent security of obedient subservience to it is an illusion we do well to subvert. Each story, however, wishes to say more more about what redemptive power might look like as a creative force for good in the universe, and more about what sort of creative force is unleashed when persons venture their own bordercrossings into the empowering freedom of authentic creatureliness. To see the former as merely the point for men, and the latter as merely that for women, however, is to miss their point entirely it is to remain bound within the limits of the patriarchal society which defined itself in this way. For each of these stories longs ultimately to narrate a tale of the subversion of the very boundaries and limits of human brokenness that require subversive strategies at all. Each longs for that bordercrossing into a new level of human existence for each and every person a world which for now can only be portrayed by fantasy, but toward which humanity, in Dickey’s words, is ever falling, and which one day, ‘fantastic’ as it seems, ‘will happen again’.

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Op-Ed for Dickinsonian, Nov. 7, 1995, Mara E. Donaldson A Horse of A Different Color: Thinking Critically About the Liberal Arts
Some of my best friends have wet noses and four legs. Yet they continue to be some of my best teachers as well. Some of my best students have only two legs, but arrive wet behind the ears themselves. From each--animal friends and student ones-- I have learned lessons that help me live with the other.

Five years of prep school teaching had imparted numerous lessons in patience and humility that were invaluable in learning to love Argus, our first dog, a 98 pound golden retriever. My first college students, especially the more obstreperous of them, taught me about the virtues of independence and pride, learning experiences that Patch, the large tomcat that adopted us, never ceased to reinforce--cats never being, of course, anything approaching humble! Those students who to this day arrive in class more preoccupied with themselves than the topics assigned on my syllabus, help me to learn again and again about living in the moment, a trait that Baggins, our Brittany Spaniel, shares in his own egotistical fashion!

Among all the four-legged creatures I adore, my heart is closest to my horses. If my students have taught me how to appreciate other creatures beyond themselves, my horses continue to teach me lessons that I find invaluable for being a liberal arts professor. Among the more important of these are the following five:

1. EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED: A 1200 pound thoroughbred is not the paradigm of predictability. There are days when I am sure Victoria is going to provide anyone who approaches her with their own personalized near-death experience. Then I ride her into the field on the hill above the barn, and she is a gem. Other days, it's exactly the opposite. I variously attribute her erratic behavior to essentialist theories, e.g., the genetic one--she's a thoroughbred after all--or to her gender--which is especially embarrassing for a feminist.
We all know of days when well prepared classes flop and other days that are absolute surprises. Despite the temptation to blame this on the essential nature of student-ness or the hormonal imbalances of late adolescence, I have learned that it is far better simply to develop a sense of humor, a sense of perspective, and an openness to learning from my students as well as being prepared to teach them.

2. COMPASSION IS THE ROOT OF REAL LEARNING: Both my horse, Victoria, and her stablemate, Olivia had been abused prior to our acquiring them. Olivia, in particular, was starved and hairless because of kerosene burns from a brainless attempt at fly-control; we literally rescued her off the truck on the way to the glue factory. That horse knew only one thing when she arrived at our farm: No one could be trusted until they had earned it through their consistent acts of compassion toward her. If I could teach one lesson to my students, I would teach them what our two thoroughbreds both knew all too well, the value of compassion and empathy for the other, and inability to learn much of anything else until we had learned about that. Thomas Merton, the mystic, called it simply "a keen awareness of the interdependence of all these living beings, which are all part of one another, and all in one another." It's not a bad start for a good liberal arts education.

3. HORSES MAKE A LANDSCAPE LOOK MORE BEAUTIFUL (Lame Deer): Living as we do in thoroughly utilitarian age, it's increasingly difficult to remember that there are some things that are good in themselves, not just because they are good for something else. Walking out into the pasture on a fall afternoon, darkness sliding down the side of the mountain, competing with the light from a rising moon, I think I'm about the task of calling the horses in to eat. And then from the far corner, before I can even distinguish their shapes and colors from the mottled leaves on autumn trees, I feel and then hear the thunder of hooves on rocky Pennsylvania clay, as my horse and her friends storm down toward the barn, shelter, and food. It's about the most thrilling thing I can imagine and important to the quality of my life beyond measure. But it's just 'for nothing'--there's nothing big accomplished here, empirically stated, the horses just run in and eat. But the moment is an end in itself, not for the sake of anything; it makes me more aware and alive and ready to be encountered by the other surprises life has to bring.

4. SACRED PLACES ARE POWERFUL PLACES: I know that this time I spend on my mother's farm is a privilege. Not everyone's mother has a farm for horses; even in my own life this may prove to be a fleeting time that will not last forever. Yet those places, at those times, are full of wonder, power and learning. Mircea Eliade, the great historian of religions, made a study of such places; holy places establish a world.

It's like the world of the classroom, the 'sacred spaces' of this campus. We have been given something that has all the quality of giftedness. Even when we feel we've had to work hard to earn every moment of it, the moments themselves that we spend in those sacred spaces are always more than we deserved, more than we could have invented on our own.

5. OUR ABILITY TO DECEIVE OURSELVES IS INFINITE: I admit that I am egregiously guilty of applying anthropomorphisms to the animals I love. I talk about horses knowing about "compassion" and "teaching" me lessons as if they were tenured professors. When I do so, however, I still must remember that a horse is really just a horse. To forget that can be dangerous and painful; a horse can step on your foot and break it and feel neither remorse or compassion. This isn't because the horse "has no feelings"; it's just that the horse's way of being a good horse is different from a person's way of being a worthwhile person. And to forget the difference between us can make me forget the responsibilities I have toward them--not as another equine friend, but as one who is entrusted with certain obligations that came with owning a horse in the first place.

Still, when it comes to students, professors sometimes have a hard time remembering such a basic lesson. We each have responsibilities in the student- teacher relationship; when either of us forgets which responsibilities belong to our particular part in that relationship, someone often gets hurt. We seem infinitely capable of deceiving ourselves, thinking that what we are doing is for the best, when it's really only self-serving and self-centered.

For example, my task as an educator is not to make students clones of me. I do not want to remake them in my image. I deceive myself when I let myself forget the role and responsibilities that I have been privileged to play with my students. I can try to make my students into persons who learn mainly about my own experiences, opinions and actions. When I do so, however, I forget that my real obligation to my students is to give them the chance "to own" and "to own up" to their own experiences, opinions, and actions.

There are important differences among opinions (experience + unexamined presuppositions), positions (opinion + presuppositions tempered by evidence & critical thinking), and convictions (opinion + position + committed action). I by no means demand that my students share my convictions; yet I do demand that they learn to move beyond adamantly stated opinions, learning to take informed positions, especially those that differ from their own opinions and convictions.

My own discipline of religious studies has struggled to learn the implications of these five lessons. To "expect the unexpected" means to learn to find important things about human religions both in places we didn't expect (movies, mandalas, and sweat lodges) and from people we didn't expect to be our teachers, including our students. To say that "compassion is the root of all learning" means in our field that we learn to empathize with the opinions, positions, and convictions of others before we criticize them for being different from us. Indeed "horses make a landscape look more beautiful" in the study of religion; we are just learning how to pay attention to the full range of aesthetic experiences that are part of the texture of "religion" as human beings understand and practice it. To remember that "sacred places are powerful places" means to attend to humanity's deep and often perplexing attachments to land and nation and place--an attachment that surfaces not only in theories about "sacred space" such as Eliade's but in the tragedies of political conflicts that erupt over disputes over "holy places," ending as some do in such utter tragedies as the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin. Religion, above all human endeavors, teaches us about the depths of human abilities to deceive ourselves; thus the religion department's senior seminar is called "Critics of Religion," to remind us that religions themselves are far from immune to the temptations to self-deception.

These lessons by no means are limited to religious studies; they transcend our attempts to corral them (I just couldn't resist one more horse metaphor!) into "disciplines." Neither are the lessons that liberal arts curricula need to learn--or those they still have to teach--limited to the five I have been recounting. A liberal arts education that has taken seriously my own laundry list of lessons is now able to tackle some of the even more pressing issues facing a college like Dickinson today.

We need to learn what it means, for example, to be an "advocate" in the classroom. We need to learn to move beyond opinions and convictions to the promotion of a certain kind of process of forming educated positions on issues--a process that involves dialogue and mutual respect, grounded in a classroom climate that nurtures honest exchange and encounter. The classroom is a political place; it should not be a politicized place. This means that we must attend to how we teach, as well as what we teach. When I am the only one who speaks, when I present only one view, when I avoid the tough issues (racism, sexism, homophobia) because they are "politically correct," I am not modeling the kind of education the liberal arts tradition itself advocates.

To speak about advocacy, however, is intimately tied to issues of diversity and justice on a liberal arts campus. In the classroom, as I suggested above, we must find more ways to open up discussion on difficult issues. But unless there is a congruence between what we say in the classroom and what we do in our lives together all over this campus--on playing fields, in dormitories, during social events, and informing college program and personnel policies--then liberal arts will remain for all of us an "ivory tower" enterprise that deserves the criticisms it receives. We must not forget that at this present time, we are seeing a strange reversal of perspective, where to raise any critical questions about a position is to be accused of proffering "politically correct" opinions, where we have lost the distinction between thinking critically about an issue and being critical of that issue. We can wonder with Alice in Through the Looking Glass if we have lost our senses.

The broadmindedness of a liberal arts environment must not lull us into the loss of our sense of justice. To listen to all sides, and to learn to appreciate the perspectives of those with whom we differ, cannot imply that the liberally-educated are absolved from the responsibilities of deciding and acting on the basis of what they know. All positions are not equal; all points of view are not morally commendable; all interpretations of events cannot claim the same support by the evidence. To think critically about the convictions and commitments we hold does not free us from the responsibility of holding them--and acting upon them when the situation demands. Certainly we must learn again and again how easy it is to deceive ourselves that our own convictions are the only ones with merit; but we are not thereby released from the responsibility to have convictions and to risk acting upon them.

I came to Dickinson five years ago, having seen first hand institutions who abdicated their moral responsibilities by scapegoating untenured faculty to save face, where the morale of the institution was so low that departments acted liked armed camps, and where what passed for a liberal arts education in the classroom was a poor cousin to business and engineering majors, the "real" degree programs. Dickinson was not like that when I came, and I believe it is not like that now, even though the economic and political times have become harder, more meanspirited. But we will not remain so unless we continue to ask ourselves what lessons we wish to teach, and what lessons we are responsible for learning.

Students, faculty, staff, and administration all have a place in the community of learning we share. When students make appointments and then do not keep them; when seniors cannot do a simple autocat search; when students wait the day before to begin a takehome exam even to find the book on which to write the exam--we need to ask ourselves what our commitments really are, what we have come here to learn. When in a time of shrinking resources requests to continue faculty lines, or the need to add lines are scrutinized and debated primarily as financial decisions; when faculty commitments to students outside the classroom, as well as their high standards for education within the classroom are seen as liabilities, rather than as assets to the community--it is important to ask what lessons these teach, and what lessons our community learns from them. I, for one, hope that we think long and hard about the lessons we teach one another, and the lessons we are willing to learn from one another- -for the answers we give to the questions facing liberal arts education today will determine what sort of education we can give and receive tomorrow.

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Prophetic and Apocalyptic Eschatology in Ursula LeGuin'sThe Farthest Shore and Tehanu Mara E. Donaldson Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA 17203
And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions Joel 2:28 And of course we have it now, the sense of an ending. Frank Kermode Farther west than west beyond the land my people are dancing on the other wind Woman of Kemay, Tehanu
Ursula K. Le Guin is perhaps one of the best known fantasy writers in America today, and her Earthsea books are among her best-known fantasies. Originally imagined as a trilogy, the first, A Wizard of Earthsea was published in 1968. It begins the story of Ged, the young, impetuous wizard who learns to use his skills wisely. It continues in The Tombs of Atuan, published in 1971, where Ged is now Archmage of Earthsea. Although Ged is a key character in The Tombs, the real hero of the story is Tenar, the girl child chosen to be priestess of the Dark Ones. She plays a crucial role in the overall story because she has the missing half of the Ring of Erreth-Akbe.
The Earthsea trilogy apparently concluded in 1972 with the publicantion of The Farthest Shore. Here, Ged, now an old wizard, undertakes one final journey to restore order and balance to Earthsea. This he does with the help of a young warrior, Arren, son of the Prince of Enlad, is destined to become a great king. In ultimately sacrificing his powers, Ged initiates a new era in Earthsea, the time once again of kings, fulfilling an 800 year old prophesy.
Le Guin wrote about the trilogy in her essay "Dreams Must Explain Themselves," (1979: 47-56). In the essay, she gave every indication that The Farthest Shore was the last of her Earthsea books: "The book is still the most imperfect of the three, but it is the one I like the best. It is the end of the trilogy, but it is the dream I have not stopped dreaming" (1979: 56). The subject of the book is death, "about the thing you do not live through and survive" (1979: 55).
Then, in 1990, Le Guin published Tehanu, which she subtitled The Last Book of Earthsea. Readers of the Earthsea books were puzzled. Why, when the Ged cycle seemed so nicely completed and the mantle passed to the young King Arren, write a fourth novel? For the protagonist in Tehanu is not Arren, the young warrior king, introduced in The Farthest Shore, but Tenar, the hero of The Tombs of Atuan and here she is clearly the main actor.
The resurrection of Earthsea and the shift in characters, however, are not the only striking characteristics of this novel. Its style is unlike the style of the other novels and in fact is atypical of Le Guin's fantasy style more generally. The most striking example of the shift in style is seen early in the story. Tenar, now called Goha and a widow, adopts a young girl child who has been severely beaten, burned, and abandoned. Fantasy literature, at least not the way most people understand "fantasy," does not usually deal with such realistic themes!
Like The Farthest Shore, Tehanu is also about the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. This time, however, the new beginning involves the young child, Therru, who becomes the Tehanu of the title and eventually the first female mage. For those familiar with LeGuin's fascination with balance and equllibrium, the fourth novel balances the second novel by finishing the story of Tenar. For others, it will be a love story, consummating the love between Ged and Tenar only hinted at in the second nove. Still again, others have suggested that the novel answers LeGuin's feminist critics. These explanations, however, do not adequately account for the shift in style.
For the reader schooled not only in fantasy literature but also in biblical literature, the last two novels offer strikingly different eschatological visions. The Farthest Shore is more prophetic in its eschatology; while Tehanu is more apocalyptic in its vision of the end time. Moreover, if the distinction holds, then what makes Tehanu, "feminist," is a theological issue, not the fact that in Tehanu the main characters are women. Thus, Le Guin challenges feminist readers, biblical scholars, and theologians to rethink the relationship between prophecy and apocalypse.
In particular, Le Guin challenges us to rethink the contributions biblicial apocalypse can offer contemproary feminist scholars. In contemporary feminist theologies, prophetic eschatology provides the predominant vision of hope as can be seen in the work of Letty Russell and Rosemary Ruether. The supposed supperiority of prophetic eschatology is its this worldliness over against the other worldliness of apocalyptic and prophecies's rejection of apocalyptic dualism. This essay argues that apocalyptic eschatology is important for two reasons. First, it offers a critique of the social status quo directed toward those in power. Second, it offers hope to those groups who are disenfranchized by those in power. Tehanu allows us to reinterpret the seeming other-worldliness of apocalyptic as speaking not of justice beyond this world, but a world genuinely beyond injustice and genuinely beyond dualism (of gender, of mage/warrior, of this world and the next) as well.

I

Writing in 1968, the year that Le Guin published A Wizard of Earthsea, the British literary critic, Frank Kermode echoed the feelings of many in America during that turbulent time (and ours now, no boubt!), "and of course we have it now, the sense of an ending" (1968: 98). For those of us coming of age during the period of the sixties and seventies, the future would forever after be ambiguous. We no longer took hope for granted. This remains our eschatology, our "teaching concerning the end of things"*(see Perrin, Eschatos "furthest" and logos "word" or "teaching", Perrin, 121, mention texts on Eschatology, Braaten's overview essay).
Interestingly enough, this period also saw a resurgence of interest in eschatology, apolcalypic literature, one the one hand and popular fantasy literature on the other*(Include references to Barth, Epistle to the Romans, 314, "Christianity that is not entirely and altogether eschatology has entirelay and altogether nothing to do with Christ; Moltmann, Theology of Hope, "The Eschatological is not one element of Christianity, but it is the medium of Christian faith as such," 16, see Collins, "Apocalyptic Eschatology as the Transcendence of Death, 61). The link between the turbulent cultural times and the biblical apocalypses is clear in Paul D. Hanson's, The Dawn of Apocalyptic, published in 1975:
To increasing numbers of observers it is beocming apparent that the dawn of a new apocalytic era is upon us...There is arising a profound disenchantment with the values and structures of our way of life. No longer does the optimism go unquestioned that ample education and hard work will be rewarded with all the benefits of the good life.*Dawn of Apcoalyptic, 1 Hanson's work was part of an impressive array of scholars who turned their attention to the Biblical apocalypses: Klaus Koch, Rediscovery of Apocalyptic, John Collins)
And Peter Beagle, an impressive fantasy writer in his own right, might have had Hanson's comment in mind when he wrote in 1973:
the sixties were the time when the word progress lost its ancient holiness and escape stopped being comically obscene. We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers, thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams (1973: frontpiece).
The resurgence of interest in apocalyptic and fantasy is more than casually significant. For within each area there emerged scholars whose work in effect legitimated apocalyptic and fantasy as genres with important social dimensions.*(here is where you mention Todorov, Rosemary Jackson,)

III

Prophecy and Apocalyse are distinctive forms of eschatology.*(something about the debate that Hanson represents about the origin and relationship between prophecy and apocalyptic) For the purpose of this essay, we are particularly interested in the nature of the social critique offered, who is being addressed, and what the paradigm of hope is.
Hanson, who argues for a clear connection between prophecy and apocalypse, defines prophetic eschatology as
the announcement to the nation of the divine plans for Israel and the world which the prophet has witnessed unfolding in the divine and which he translates into the terms of plain history, real politics, and human instrumentality. (1975: 11)
Prophetic eschatology is this-worldly, its analysis of the social deterioration caused by the breakdown of the covenant relationship with Yahweh. It is addressed to those who have power and those who have abused power. The emphasis in prophetic eschatology is on the community of Israel as a whole. The vision of the new, transformed future varies. Amos speaks of a return to a purer Davidic time, "In that day I will raise up the booth of David that is fallen and repair its breaches and raise up its ruins and rebuild it as in the days of old" (Amos 9.11) while Joel speaks of something brand new, "And it shall come to pass afterward that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophecy" (Joel 2:28). And Isaiah speaks of a future that is old and new, "There shall come forth a shoot from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots...The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling toghether, and a little child shall lead them" (Isaiah 11.1, 6).
Hanson defines Apocalyptic eschatology as
the disclosure (usually esoteric in nature) to the elect of the cosmic vision of Yahweh's sovereignty--especially as it relates to his acting to deliver his faithful--which disclosure the visionaries have largely ceased to translate into terms of plain history, real politics and human instrumentality. (1975: 11)
In contrast to prophetic eschatology apocalyptic eschatology envisions an other-worldly salvation, conditions in this world having deteriorated beyond repair. The words were addressed to those who were disenfrancised, those who were precisely the oppressed. Apocalyptic literature was an underground literature, written pseudonomously to encourage and strenthen those whose hope had been stripped away. It was an attack against the status quo and its vision of the future was something beyond this world, something new. Revelation speaks of a "new heaven and a new earth." "Behold, I make all things new," says the one on the throne (21.1,5). Although the entire world would be created anew, apocalyptic eschatology extends salvation to the individual as well.*(Collins, VATA, 68) Daniel speaks of the resurrection of the elect, "And there shall be a time of trouble, such as never has been since there was a nation till that time; but at that time your people shall be delivered, every one whose name shall be found written in the book" (12.1).
Carl Braaten summarizes the shift in emphasis, "Prophetic eschatology centers on the history of Israel amid the nations of the world and points to a future in history with promises of a better life. Apocalyptic eschaltology looks beyond Israel to the cosmos, beyond the savastion of Israel to the final future of history itself" (?). For our purposes the different eschatologies are helpful in sorting out the shifts in the types of endings in Le Guin's final Earthsea books. We will concentrate on the nature of the social analysis, who is redeemed, and what the hope for the future is.

IV

At the time of the renewed interest in eschatology generally and bibilical apocalypse in particular, there was a similar renewal of interest in fantasy literature and scholarship.*(The parallels are remarkable. Issues, texts)
During the sixties, for the first time in this country, readership of Tolkien's trilogy increased, peaking during the Vietnam War. Charlotte Spivak noted that the interest was more than diversionary, "Much more than a mere best seller, The Lord of the Rings was a spiritual contstruct for our materialistic time, a powerfully evocative symbol of what seemed to be wrong and what should be done about it"*Spivak, Merlin's Daughters, 7).
For Spivak, Tolkien was especially significant because of the element of "political subversion" in his work. "Tolkien converted the quest to find something into the quest to destroy something. As metaphor Frodp's quest to destroy the ring of power signaled a protest against the establishment: antiwar, antitechnology, antipower politics"*(7). In this Tolkien followed the a trait in earlier fantasies, such as Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland or Frank Baum's Wizard of Oz. Speaking of the psychological importance of the fantastic in literature, Rosemary Jackson speaks of fantasy as "the literature of subversion."*(Rosemary Jackson,
The idea of subversion is very significant aspect of my own approach to fantasy. Rather than a sub/version of literature, fantasy subverts the reader's everyday understanding of the world. It interrupts the the ordinary expectations with an implausible, (W.R. Irwin would say "impossible") alternative. The activity of interruption is what Todorov calls "hesitation," and is at the heart of the fantastic for him, "The fantastic is that hesitation experienced by a person who knows only the laws of nature, confronting an apparently supernatural event.*(Todorov, 25) Although Todorov is not interested in The Fantastic in popular fantasy, his perspective is extraordinarily significant for understanding the theological significance of popular fantasy. Todorov goes on to use the language of "belief" to develop his approach: "'I nearly reached the point of believing': that is the formula which sums up the spirit of the antastic. Either total faith or total incredulity would lead us beyond the fantastic: it is hesitation which sustains its life."*(Todorov, 31) Todorov emphasizes that the hestiation must be expereinced by the reader "as the first condition of the fantastic" (31) but when the hestitation ends the fantastic becomes either "the marvelous" or "the uncanny," depending upon the way the reader resolves the question about the supernatural. For Colin Manlove, however, it is not hestiation, but wonder that the reader expereinces in reading fantasy. Fantasy, "is a fiction evoking wonder and containing a substantial and irreducible element of the supernatural with which the mortal characters in the story or the readers become on at least partly familiar terms."*(Manlove, Colin, Modern Fantasy: Five Studies, 1)
Writing in Faith in History & Society, the political theologian Johann Baptist Metz links hesitiation to religion, "the shortest definition of religion: interruption."*(Johann Baptist Metz, 171) and ties both rhetorically to narrative, "Is narrative not the language of the interrutption of the system--in other words, the language of the everything that eludes interpretation by our complex and metatheoretical systems of knowledge?"*(Metz, 215)
C.S. Lewis understood the subversive and religious elements as central to fantasy, but he added another characteristic. Writing in his essay, "On Stories," about religion, he reflects, I saw how stories of this kind could steal past a certain inhibition which had paralysed much of my own religion in childhood...The whole subject was associated with lowered vioces; almost as if it were something medical. But supposing that byu casting all these things into an imaginary world, stripping them of their stained-class and Sunday school associations, one could make them for the first time appear in their real potency?"*(Lewis, C.S., "Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What's to Be Said," in On Stories, 47)
What Lewis calls "real potency," I call "paradigms of hope." That is to say, religious fantasy not only interrupts our everyday understanding of the world and our place in it, it resacralizes that world and empowers us to participate in the healing of that world. Fantasy, after all, always has a happy ending.
The tension between subversion and hope, therefore, is central to our examination of Le Guin's prophetic and apocalyptic eschatologies in The Farthest Shore and Tehanu. We may say that both are fantasies because both subverts and redeems, but in different ways. As we now return to the novels, we will ask what is subverted and what are the paradigms of hope that each offers?

II

All is not well in Earthsea. Mages have lost their skills, especially their ability to know the true names of things; crops fail, babies are sacrificed, and animals are born grossly deformed. The dragon Orm Embar tells Ged, "The sense has gone out of things. There is a hole in the world and the sea is running out of it. The light is running out. There will be no more speaking and no more dying" (154). In short, the primary balance or equillibrium in Earthsea has been upset and it is up to Ged, now an old wizard and archmage of Earthsea and his young comparion, Arren to restore it.
Throughout the Earthsea stories LeGuin, deeply influenced by philosophical Taoism and Jungian psychology, makes equillibrium and identity cornerstones of her metaphysic. In The Farthest Shore the balance has been upset by a former wizard, Cob, who has discovered a way to cross the boundary between life and death. He returns to tempt villagers, witches, and other wizards with immortality, and the necessay balance between life and death is upset.
In order to restore balance, Ged uses all of his powers. When he and Arren finally follow Cob to Selidor, the source of the Dry River, "the place where a dead soul, crawling into earth and darkness, was born again dead" (183) Ged closes the door, "Be thou made whole!" he said in a clear voice, and with his staff he drew in lines of fire across the gat of rocks a fugure; the rune Agnen, the Rune of Ending" (184). But in closing the door and finally releasing Cob from his life-in-death, Ged, too, is no longer a mage, but a very weak man. It is up to Arren and ultimately to the great dragon Kalessin to rescue them. Two endings are offered in the Farthest Shore about Ged. The first, tells of his attending the crowning of Arren in Havnor and then calling his boat, Lookfar, sails off alone. The second, is that the young king tries to find his friend to bring him to the coronation, but cannot find him either at Gont Port or Re Albi. There are stories that he has gone to the forests of the mountain, and so Arren leaves without him.
Arren is a significant and curious character in the story. In some ways he reminds us of the young Ged who goes to the School for Wizards in Roke to become a wizard but who, in his enthusiasm and impatience, calls forth a shadow and also upsets the balance for a time. But Arren is not a wizard and does not come to Roke, seeking Ged, to become one. Instead, he is young warrior, the son of the Prince of Enlad. He originally seeks Ged to tell him of the evil he has seen. He ends up staying and becoming the Archmage's companion on the journey to find the source of the imbalance.
Arren is the symbol of hope in The Farthest Shore. He is the one who must learn the lesson that life and death balance one another, "To refuse death is to refuse life" (121). Dying is the natural consequence of living. Ged tells Arren, "You will die. You will not live forever. Nor will any man nor any thing. Northing is immortal. But only to us is it given to know that we must die. And that is a great gift: the gift of selfhood" (122).
Arren also represents the future hope of Earthsea, a paradigm of hope as restoration. He is the son of a king, a young warrior destined to fulfill an 800 year old prophecy made by the last king of Earthsea, "He shall inherit my throne who has crossed the dark land living and come to the far shores at the end of the day" (17). His journey with Ged teaches him the lesson of mortality and makes him a good king. When at the end, as he struggles to carry an unconscious Ged out of the Dry Land, before Kallesin arrives, a very discouraged Arren finds a part of a rock from the Mountains of Pain, "He held it in his hand, the unchanging thing, the stone of pain. He closed his hand on it and held it. And he smiled then, a smile both somber and youous, knowing, for the first time in his life, alone, unpraised, and at the end of the world, victory" (191).
Thus, what is subverted in The Farthest Shore is our quest for immortality; the paradigm of hope that is offered is one of restoration. We know that even if Ged does not attend Arren's coronation that the future will be good because in the past the kings were good.

As mentioned in the beginning of the essay, Tehanu begins violently with the beating and burning of a young child. Tenar, who is called Goha in Middle Valley, names the young child Therru, which means "burning, the flaming of fire" (21). The violence against Therru is not the only violence in the story, however. At the end, when Ged and Tenar are caught in a binding spell, Tenar is made to crawl like a dog, and she is beaten and kicked while Ged is left to watch. That the violence is against women is not accidental. Such violence against women points to the social critique offered in the novl.
Tehanu takes place just before and immediately after Lebannen's (Arren's true name) coronation. With the violence done to the young child and Tenar moral evil is added to the description of natural evil given in The Farthest Shore. When Beech, the sourcerer of Valmouth, had tried to lessen the pain and scarring of the burns on Therru, he said, "I think a time in which such things as this occur must be a time of ruining, the end of an age" (15). A year after Tenar saves Therru she is called to the bedside of the mage of Re Albi, Ogion. She takes Therru with her, for she is still in danger. When Ogion sees the scarred child he knows she is different. "That one--they will fear her." Tenar assumes he is referring to the way Therru looks but that is not what the old mage means. Ogion says, "Teach her, Tenar...teach her all! Not Roke." What this means is not clear to Tenar because only wizards are taught at the School of Roke and only men can be wizards.
There has never been a female mage in Earthsea. A hierarchical relationship exists between the male power of the mage and the female power of the witches of Earthsea. Witches could heal and prepare certain kinds of potions, but only mages knew the true names of things and only the mages could truly change into another being. In referring to the untapped potential of female power, Auntie Moss, the witch of Gont, says, "No one knows, no one knows, no one can say what I am, what a woman is, a woman of power, deeper than the roots oftrees, deeper than the roots of islands, older than the making, older than the moon" (52).
When Ged appears in Oak Village, exhausted and out of power he can neither save Therru or provide Earthsea with a successor. Orgion has died. The future is uncertain.
On the way to Gont, Tenar tells Therru part of the creation story of Eas, of a time when there were beings who could be two things at once, something even mages cannot do. These beings were both dragon and human, "They were all one people, one race, winged, and speaking the True Language. They were beautiful, and strong, and wise, and free. But in time nothing can be without becoming" (11). The dragons became those who were in love with flight and they became wild and greedy. These dragons fled east. Humans became those in love with the things of the land and they, too, became greedy. But "among them there were some who saved the learning of the dragons--the True Language of the Making--and these are now the wizards" (11).
The old story also told of some who remembered that they were both dragon and human and some who fled not east but west. There, they live "in peace, great winged beings both wild and wise, with human mind and dragon heart" where according to the song,

Farther west than west
beyond the land
my people are dancing
on the other wind (12)

III

Popular fantasy is ultimately a hopeful genre. When it works well, the happy ending is also a new beginning. As Le Guin's two visions of the happy ending--The Farthest Shore and Tehanu--demonstrate, however, the paradigms of hope for the future offer alternative readings on the future. The first, The Farthest Shore is more prophetic in its eschatology. The future is a logical extension, what prophetic eschatology calls "this-worldly eschatology," of the themes begun in The Wizard of Earthsea. In fulfilling an 800 year old prophecy, Arren returns monarch to Earthsea. The future is a restoration of a glorious past.
In its subversion of immortality and defense of a natural relationship between living and dying, the point of view in The Farthest Shore is more traditionally masculine. In her discussion of eschatology in Sexism and God Talk, Rosemary Ruether argues that the idea of immortality may be the preoccupation of men more than women because it is the exression of a "male individualism and abstractioism from real-life processes" (Ruether, 236).
The second, Tehanu, is more apocalytic. Throughout Tehanu it is not clear who or what Therru really is. The source of her power is not found in Earthsea; it breaks the boundaries of what we logically expect. In its condemnation of violence, especially violence against women, in its celebration of a woman's power, the point of view in Tehanu is feminist. What may seem strange to many readers, especially those familiar with Ruether's critique of apocalyptic, is that we hold up apocalyptic eschatology as an important resource for scholars trying to envision "a new heaven and a new earth."
Yet as Tina Pippin has argued in her essay included here on the Apocalypse of John, "women of the past as well as the present are going to have to be about the business of creating their own apocalyptic tales, their own utopian narratives" (?). Contemporary fantasy literature such as Le Guin writes is about the business of creating new paradigms of hope. As in Tehanu where on a fundamental level the story speaks to those who traditionally have been without power, those who have suffered, saying there is a place "Farther west than west/beyond the land/[where] my people are dancing/on the other wind" (9).
 

1973-1993: A Selected Bibliography of Women in Religion
Mara E. Donaldson and Heather Callahan

I. Women Within Traditional Religions

Christianity:

Bass, Dorothy C. and Sandra Hugues Boyd. Women in American Religious History: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide to Sources. Boston: G.K. Hall, 1986.

Finson, Shelley Davis. Women and Religion: A Bibliographic Guide to Christian Feminist Liberation Theology. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991.

Andolsen, Barbara; Gudorf, C.; Pellauer, M., eds. Women's Consciousness: Women's Conscience: A Reader in Feminist Ethics. Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1985.

Andolsen, Barbara Hilkert. Daughters of Jefferson. Daughters of Bootblacks: Racism and American Feminism. Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1986.

Arthur, Rose Horman. The Wisdom Goddess: Feminine Motifs in Eight Nag Hammadi Documents. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984.

Major themes covered in this work: the relative decline in the prestige of personified Sophia (wisdom) from non- Christian to Christian documents, the fault of the woman, the soul imaged as feminine, mythological imagery presented with feminine imagery, the creation of Eve before Adam, and the formation of the world by Pistis Sophia.

Atkinson, Clarissa. Mystic and Pilgrim: The Book and the World of Margery Kempe. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983.

------. The Oldest Vocation: Christian Motherhood in the Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991.

Atkinson, Clarissa, Constance H. Buchanan, and Margaret Miles, eds. Shaping New Vision: Gender and Values in American Culture. The Harvard Women's Studies in Religion Series, vol. 2. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1987.

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1986.

Bacon, Margaret Hope. Mothers of Feminism: The Story of Quaker Women in America. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986.

Baker, Derek, ed. Medieval Woman. Oxford: B. Blackwell for the Ecclesiastical History Society, 1978.

Bal, Mieke. Lethal Love: Feminist Literary Readings of Biblical Love Stories. Bloomington: Indiana Univeristy Press, 1987.

------. Death and Dissymmetry: The Politics of Coherence in the Book of Judges. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988.

------. Murder and Difference: Gender, Genre, and Scholarship on Sisera's Death. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992.

------. Anti-Covenant: Counter-Reading Women's Lives in the Hebrew Bible. Bible and Literature Series; 22. Journal for the Study of the Old Testament. Sheffield Almond Press, 1989.

Belonick, Deborah. Feminism in Christianity: An Orthodox Christian Response. Syosset, NY: Dept. of Religious Education, Orthodox Church in America, 1983.

Bianchi, Eugene and Rosemary Radford Ruether. From Machismo to Mutuality: Essays on Sexism and Woman-Man Liberation. New York: Paulist Press, 1976.

Bilinkoff, Jodi. The Avila of St. Theresa: Religious Reform in a Sixteenth-Century City. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989.

Braude, Ann. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth Century America. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

Brock, Rita Nakashima. Journeys by Heart. A Christology of Erotic Power. New York: Crossroad, 1988.

Buckley, Jorunn Jacobsen. Female Fault and Fulfillment in Gnosticism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986.

A discussion of the variety of female figures in six Gnostic texts, including The Book of Baruch, The Apocryphon of John, Excerpta ex Theodoto, The Gospel of Thomas, and The Gospel of Philip. The first chapters present ambivalent and ambiguous female figures (Eden, Ruha) strongly connected to the presence of evil. In the last chapters, female followers of Jesus become the paradigm for the saved. The "work attempts to broaden the scope of female imagery" dominant in the canonical creation stories.

Bynum, Caroline; Harrell, Stevan; Richman, Paula, eds. Gender and Religion: On the Complexity of Symbols. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1982.

------. Holy Feast and Holy Fast: The Religious Significance of Food to Medieval Women. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Cahill, Lisa Sowle. Between the Sexes: Foundations for a Christian Ethics of Sexuality. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985.

Cannon, Katie G. and Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza, eds. Interpretation for Liberation. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989.

Cannon, Katie et al. God's Fierce Whimsy: Christian Feminism and Theological Education. NYC: Pilgrim Press, 1985.

Carmody, Denise Lardner. Feminism and Christianity: A Two-Way Reflection. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1982.

------. The Double Cross: Ordination, Abortion and Catholic Feminism. NY: Crossroad, 1986.

------. Biblical Women: Contemporary Reflections on Scriptural Texts. New York: Crossroad, 1988.

Carr, Anne E. Transforming Grace: Christian Tradition and Women's Experience. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988.

Carroll, Jackson W., Barbara Hargrove and Adair T. Lummis. Women of the Cloth: A New Opportunity for the Churches. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983.

Cazden, Elizabeth. Antoinette Brown Blackwell: A Biography. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1983.

Chittister, Joan and Marty, Martin. Faith and Ferment: An Interdisciplinary Study of Christian Beliefs and Practices. Minneapolis: Augsburg Press, 1983.

Clark, Elizabeth and Richardson, Herbert. Women and Religion: A Feminist Sourcebook of Christian Thought. New York: Harper and Row, 1977.

Clark, Elizabeth. Women in the Early Church: Message of the Fathers of the Church. Wilmington, Del.: Michael Glazier, 1983.

Clark, Linda, Marian Ronan and Elanor Walker. Image Breaking/Image Building: A Handbook for Creative Worship with Women of Christian Tradition. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1981.

Cole, Phyllis B. Holy Independence: Mary Moody Emerson and Her Family. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

Collins, Adela, ed. Feminist Perspectives on Biblical Scholarship. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1985.

Collins, Sheila D. A Different Heaven and Earth. Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1974.

Condron, Mary. The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989.

This work address pre-Christian, early Christian, and contemporary periods of Irish history, emphasizing the "patriarchal power typical of the philosophical framework of each period." (xi) Considerable discussion is given to the notion that: "... historically, women as the givers of life have become subservient to men, the takers of life." (xii) An extremely important idea now as the emerging feminine consciousness poses a threat to the god of Western culture.

Conn, Joann Wolski, ed. Women's Spirituality: Resources for Christian Development. New York: Paulist Press, 1986.

Cornwall Collective. Your Daughters Shall Prophesy: Feninist Alternatives in Theological Education. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1980.

Crotwell, Helen Gray, ed. Women and the Word: Sermons. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978.

Cunneen, Sally. Mother Church: What the Experience of Women is Teaching Her. New York: Paulist Press, 1991.

Curb, Rosemary and Manahan, Nancy, eds. Lesbian Nuns Breaking Silence. Tallahassee, FL: Naiad Press, 1985.

Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973.

Davaney, Sheila Greeve. Feminism and Process Thought. NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1981.

DeBerg, Betty, A. Ungodly Women: Gender and the First Wave of American Fundamentalism. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990.

de Laurentis, Theresa, ed. Feminist Studies/Critical Studies. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Douglas, Ann. The Feminization of American Culture. New York: Knopf, 1977.

Douglass, Jane Dempsey. Women, Freedom, and Calvin. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1985.

Dronke, Peter. Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (203) to Marguerite Porete (1310). Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Elizondo, Virgil and Norbert Greinacher, eds. Women in a Man's Church. New York: Seabury Press, 1980.

Ellison, Craig W., ed. Your Better Self: Christianity, Psychology & Self-Esteem. New York: Harper and Row, 1983.

Emswiler, Sharon Neufer and Thomas Neufer Emswiler. Women and Worship: A Guide to Nonsexist Hymns, Prayers, and Liturgies. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1984 (1974).

A source book and guide to aid in incorporating nonsexist language, working for inclusive language, creating nonsexist liturgies, and changing attitudes toward worship. Liberated prayers and services suggested. Resources and further readings included.

Ewens, Mary. The Role of the Nun in Nineteenth Century America. New York: Arno Press, 1978.

Ferrante, Joan M. Woman as Image in Medieval Literature, from the Twelfth Century to Dante. New York: Columbia University Press, 1975.

Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schussler. Bread Not Stone: The Challenge of Feminist Biblical Interpretation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.

------. Claiming the Center: A Feminist Critical Theology of Liberation. NYC: Seabury Press, 1986.

------. In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. NYC: Crossroads, 1983.

------. The Book of Revelation: Justice and Judgement. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984.

Fiorenza, Elisabeth Schussler and Collins, Mary. Women-- Invisible in Theology and Church. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1985.

Fortune, Marie. Is Nothing Sacred?: When Sex Invades the Pastoral Relationship. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989.

------. Sexual Violence: The Unmentionable Sin. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1983.

* Gillespie, Joanna Bowen. Women Speak: On God, Congregations, and Change. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International, 1994.

Gillespie presents the results of a study of four Episcopal churches located throughout the U.S. with interviews with sixty women church members between the ages of twenty-eight to ninety-three. They speak about changes they have seen, reactions they have to these changes, and how they are effected by feminist theological writings.

Gundry, Patricia. Neither Slave Nor Free: Helping Women Answer the Call to Church Leadership. San Francosco: Harper and Row, 1987.

Hackett, Jo Ann. The Balaam Text from Deir 'Alla. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1984.

Haney, Eleanor Humes. Vision and Power: Meditations on Feninist Spirituality and Politics. Portland, ME: Astarte Shell Press, 1986.

Hardesty, Nancy A. Inclusive Language in the Church. Atlanta, GA: John Knox Press, 1987.

Harrison, Beverley W. Making the Connections: Essays in Feminist Social Ethics. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985.

------. Our Right to Choose: Toward a New Ethic of Abortion. Boston: Beacon Press, 1983.

* Hewitt, Marsha Aileen. Critical Theory of Religion: A Feminist Analysis. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Press, 1994.

This work examines two major themes: critical social theory of the Frankfurt School, and feminist theology, particularly that of Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Rosemary Radford Ruether and Mary Daly. She suggests the possibility that feminist theology may be the transformative vehicle of Christianity and for critical correction of the Frankfurt School.

Heyer, Robert J., ed. Women and Orders. New York: Paulist Press, 1974.

Heyward, Carter. A Priest Forever. NY: Harper and Row, 1976.

------. The Redemption of God: A Theology of Mutual Relation. Washington: University Press of America, 1982.

------. Our Passion for Justice: Images of Power, Sexuality, and Liberation. NY: Pilgrim Press, 1984.

Hopko, Thomas, ed. Women and the Priesthood. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir's Seminary Press, 1983.

Hosmer, Rachel. Gender and God: Love and Desire in Christian Spirituality. Cowley Publications, 1986.

Huber, Elaine C. Women and the Authority of Inspiration: A Reexamination of Two Prophetic Movements from a Comtemporary Feminist Perspective. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985.

Humez, Jean McMahon, ed. Gifts of Power: The Writings of Rebecca Jackson, Black Visionary, Shaker Eldress. Amherst, MA: University of Massachussets Press; London: Eurospan, 1987.

Hunt, Mary E. Fierce Tenderness: A Feminist Theology of Friendship. NY: Crossroad, 1991.

Hutaff, Margaret, ed. Woman and Roman Catholic: Is It Possible? North Easton, MA: Institute of Justice and Peace, Stonehill College, 1981.

Ide, Arthur Fredrick. The Teachings of Jesus on Women. Dallas: Texas Independent Press, 1984.

Jegen, Carol Frances, ed. Mary According to Women. Kansas City, MO: Sheed and Ward, 1985.

Jewett, Paul K. The Ordination of Women: An Essay on the Office of Christian Ministry. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1980.

Johnson, Penelope. Equal in Monastic Prefession: Religious Women in Medieval France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991.

Keller, Catherine. From a Broken Web: Separatism, Sexism, and Self. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

Kinnear, Mary. Daughters of Time: Women in the Western Tradition. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1982.

Kolbenschlag, Madonna. Kiss Sleeping Beauty Good-Bye: Breaking the Spell of Feminine Myths and Models. Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1979.

Lang, Amy Schrager. Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of Dissent in the Literature of New England. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Lincoln, Victoria. Teresa: A Woman. A Biography of Teresa of Avila. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1984.

MacHaffie, Barbara J. Her Story: Women in Christian Tradition. Phildelphia: Fortress Press, 1988.

------, ed. Readings in Her Story: Women in Christian Tradition. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1992.

Maitland, Sara. A Map of the New Country: Women and Christianity. London; Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983.

Malmgreen, Gail, ed. Religion in the Lives of English Women, 1760-1930. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

------. Silktown: Macclesfield, 1750-1835. Hull: Hull University Press; Distributed in USA by Humanities Press, 1985.

Massey, Marilyn Chapin. Feminine Soul: The Fate of an Ideal. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985.

McFague, Sallie. Models of God: Theology for An Ecological, Nuclear Age. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1987.

McGrew Bennet, Anne. From Woman-Pain to Woman-Vision: Writings in Feminist Theology. Edited by Mary E. Hunt. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989.

McNamara, Jo Ann. A New Song: Celibate Women in the First Three Christian Centuries. New York: Harrington Park, 1985.

Miles, Margaret. Image as Insight: Visual Understanding in Western Christianity and Secular Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985.

------. Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

Milhaven, Annie Lally, ed. The Inside Stories: Thirteen Valiant Women Challenging the Church. Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1987.

------, ed. Sermons Seldom Heard: Women Proclaim Their Lives. New York: Crossroad, 1991.

Mollenkott, Virginia. The Divine Feminine: The Biblical Imagery of God as Female. New York: Crossroad, 1983.

Moltmann-Wendel, Elisabeth. A Land Flowing with Milk and Honey: Perspectives on Feminist Theology. NY: Crossroad, 1986.

------. The Women Around Jesus. NY: Crossroad, 1982.

Morton, Nelle. The Journey is Home. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985.

The Mudflower Collective. God's Fierce Whimsy: Christian Feminism and Theological Education. Edited by Carter Heyward. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1985.

National Council of Churches. An Inclusive Language Lectionary. John Knox, Pilgrim Press, Westminster, 1983.

Neal, Sister Marie Augusta. From Nuns to Sisters: An Expanding Vocation. Mystic, CT: Twenty-Third Publications, 1990.

------. Catholic Sisters in Transition from the 1960s to the 1980s. Wilmington, DE: Michael Glazier, 1984.

Nelson, James B. Embodiment: An Approach to Sexuality and Christian Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Augusburg Publishing House, 1978.

Newman, Barbara. Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard's Theology of the Feminine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

Nodding, Nel. Women and Evil. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989.

Ochs, Carol. Behind the Sex of God: Toward a New Consciousness- -Transcending Matriarchy and Patriarchy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1977.

Ochshorn, Judith. The Female Experience and the Nature of the Divine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.

Oddie, William. What Will Happen to God: Feminism and the Reconstruction of Christian Belief. London: SPCK, 1984.

O'Donovan, Oliver. The Problem of Love in St. Augustine. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980.

Ohanneson, Joan. Woman: Survivor in the Church. Minneapolis, MN: Winston Press, 1980.

Osiek, Carolyn Ann. Beyond Anger: On Being a Feminist in the Church. New York: Paulist Press, 1986.

Owen, Alexandria. The Darkened Room: Women, Power and Spiritualism in Late Victorian England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990.

Pagels, Elaine. The Gnostic Gospels. NY: Random House, 1980.

------. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. NY: Random House, 1987.

Petroff, Elizabeth A., ed. Medieval Women's Visionary Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

Pilgrim Press Editors. Spinning a Sacred Yarn: Women Speak from the Pulpit. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1982.

Plaskow, Judith. Sex, Sin, and Grace: Women's Experience and the Theologies of Reinhold Neibhur and Paul Tillich. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1980.

Prelinger, Catherine. Charity, Challenge and Change: Religious Dimensions of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century Women's Movement in Germany. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987.

Proctor, Priscilla and William. Women in the Pulpit: Is God an Equal Opportunity Employer? Garden City, NJ: Doubleday, 1976.

Procter-Smith, Marjorie. In Her Own Rite: Constructing Feminist Liturgical Tradition. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1990.

* Ramshaw, Gail. God Beyond Gender: Feminist Christian God- Language. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Press, 1994.

Ramshaw examines the word God, the king and trinity, divine pronouns, and metaphoric language to suggest the inclusion of many different words and images to express God. She believes that Christians need to find common language to remain both within their tradition and and the present cultural context.

Rich, Adrienne. The Dream of a Common Language: Poems: 1974- 77. NY: Norton, 1978.

Ringe, Sharon H. Jesus, Liberation, and the Biblical Jubilee: Images for Ethics and Christology. Philadelphia: Fortress, 1985.

Romney, Judith. Women in the Shaker Community and Worship: A Feminist Analysis of the Uses of Religious Symbolism. Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1985.

Ruether, Rosemary Radford. Mary, The Feminine Face of the Church. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1977.

------. To Change the World: Christology and Cultural Criticism. New York: Crossroad, 1981.

------, ed. Religion and Sexism: Images of Woman in the Jewish and Christian Traditions. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1974.

------, ed. Women-Church: Theology and Practice of Feminist Liturgical Communities. NY: Harper and Row, 1985.

------, ed. Womanguides: Reading Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985.

------, ed. Sexism and God-Talk: Toward a Feminist Theology. Boston, Beacon Press, 1983.

------, ed. New Woman, New Earth: Sexist Ideologies and Human Liberation. NY: Seabury, 1975. Ruether, Rosemary Radford and Keller, Rosemary. Women and Religion in America. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981.

Ruether, Rosemary and Eleanor McLaughlin, eds. Women of Spirit: Female Leadership in the Jewish and Christian Traditions. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.

Russell, Letty M. Household of Freedom: Authority in Feminist Theology. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1987. ------. Human Liberation in a Feminist Perspective-- A Theology. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974.

------. Becoming Human. Phildelphia: Westminster Press, 1982.

------, ed. The Liberating Word: A Guide to Nonsexist Interpretation of the Bible. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1976.

------, ed. Feminist Interpretation of the Bible. Phildelphia: Westminster Press, 1985.

------,ed. Changing Contexts of Our Faith. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985.

Schaberg, Jane. The Illegiyimacy of Jesus: A Feminist Theological Interpretation of the Infancy Narratives. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987.

Schaef, Anne Wilson. Women's Reality: An Emerging Female System in the White Male Society. Minneapolis: Winston Press, 1981.

Soelle, Dorothee. The Strength of the Weak: Toward a Christian Feminist Identity. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1984.

Sommers, Elaine. Mennonite Women: A Story of God's Faithfulness, 1683-1983. Scottsdale, PA: Hearlad Press, 1983.

Stendahl, Brita. The Force of Tradition: A Case Study of Women Priests in Sweden. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1985.

Stone, Merlin. When God was a Woman. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978.

Swidler, Arlene and Leonard, eds. Women Priests: A Catholic Commentary on the Vatican Declaration. New York: Paulist Press, 1977.

Swidler, Leonard. Biblical Affirmations of Woman. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1979.

Tamaz, Elsa, trans. by Matthew J. O'Connell. Bible of the Oppressed. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1982.

Thistlethwaite, Susan. Sex, Race and God: Christian Feminism in Black and White. New York: Cossroad, 1989.

Thurston, Bonnie Bowman. The Widows: A Women's Ministry in the Early Church. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989.

Tolbert, Mary Ann, ed. The Bible and Feminist Hermeneutics. Semia Series, no. 28. Chico, CA: Scholar's Press, 1983.

Trible, Phyllis. God and the Rhetoric of Sexuality. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1978.

------. Texts of Terror: Literary-Feminist Readings of Biblical Narratives. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984.

Tucker, Cynthia Grant. Prophetic Sisterhood: Liberal Women Ministers of the Frontier, 1880-1930. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.

Ulanov, Ann Belford. Receiving Woman: Studies in the Psychology and Theology of the Feminine. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1981.

Valenze, Deborah M. Prophetic Sons and Daughters: Female Preaching and Popular Religion in Industrial England. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Van Scoyoc, Nancy J. Women, Change and the Church. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1980.

Wahlberg, Rachel Conrad. Jesus According to a Woman. New York: Paulist Press, 1975.

Warner, Marina. Alone of All Her Sex: The Myth and Cult of the Virgin Mary. New York: Knopf; Distributed by Random House, 1976.

------. Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism. New York: Knopf, 1981.

Watkins, Keith. Faithful and Fair: Transcending Sexist Language in Worship. Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1981.

Weaver, Mary Jo. New Catholic Women: A Contemporary Challenge to Traditional Religious Authority. NY: Harper and Row, 1985.

Weidman, Judith L., ed. Women Ministers. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985.

------, ed. Christian Feminism: Visions of a New Humanity. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983.

Welch, Sharon D. Communities of Resistance and Solidarity: A Feminist Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1985.

------. A Feminist Ethic of Risk. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990.

Wilson-Kastner, Patricia. Faith, Feminism and the Christ. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1983.

------, et al. A Lost Tradition: Women Writers of the Early Church. Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1981.

Wire, Antoinette. The Corinthian Women Prophets: A Reconstruction Through Paul's Rhetoric. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990.

Zanotti, Barbara, ed. A Faith of One's Own: Explorations by Catholic Lesbians. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1986.

Judaism:

Adelman, Penina. Miriam's Well: Rituals for Jewish Women Around the Year. Second edition. New York: Biblio Press, 1990.

Baum, Charlotte, Paula Hyman, and Sonya Michel. The Jewish Woman in America. New York: Dial Press, 1976.

Beck, Evelyn, ed. Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

Biale, Rachel. Women and Jewish Law: An Exploration of Women's Issues in Halakhic Sources. New York: Schocken Books, 1984.

Broner, E.M. A Weave of Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985.

Brooten, Bernadette J. Women Leaders in the Ancient Synagogue: Inscroptional Leaders and Background Issues. Chico, CA: Scholars Press, 1982.

Davidman, Lynn. Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Day, Peggy L. Gender and Difference in Ancient Israel. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989.

Fuchs, Esther. Israeli Mythognies: Women in Contemporary Hebrew Fiction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987.

Greenburg, Blu. On Women and Judaism: A View from Tradition. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1981.

Hamelsdorf, Ora and Sandra Adelsberg, eds. Jewish Women and Jewish Law Bibliography. Fresh Meadows, NY: Biblio Press 1980.

Harris, Lis. Holy Days: The World of a Hasidic Family. New York: Summit Books, 1985.

Heschel, Susannah, ed. On Being a Jewish Feminist: A Reader. NY: Schocken Books, 1983.

Jeansonne, Sharon Pace. The Women of Genesis: From Sarah to Potiphar's Wife. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990.

Kaplan, Marion A. The Jewish Feminist Movement in Germany: The Campaigns of the Judischer Frauenbund, 1904-1938. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979.

Kaufman, Debra Renee. Rachel's Daughters: Newly Orthodox Jewish Women. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991.

Kaye-Kantrowitz, Melanie and Irena Klepfisz, eds. The Tribe of Dina: A Jewish Women's Anthology. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

Kolton, Elizabeth, ed. The Jewish Woman: New Perspectives. New York: Schocken Books, 1976.

Lacks, Roslyn. Women and Judaism: Myth, History, and Struggle. New York: Doubleday, 1980.

LaCocque, Andre. The Feminine Unconventional: Four Subversive Figures in Israel's Tradition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1990.

Mazow, Julia Wolf, ed. The Woman Who Lost Her Names: Selected Writings by American Jewish Women. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980.

Plaskow, Judith. Standing Again at Sinai: Rethinking Judaism From a Feminist Perspective. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990.

Wegner, J.R. Chattell or Person?: The Status of Women in the Mishnah. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Weissler, Chava. Traditional Yiddish Literature: A Source for the Study of Women's Religious Lives. Cambridge: Harvard University Library, 1988.

------. Making Judaism Meaningful: Ambivalence and Tradition in a Havurah Community. New York: AMS Press, 1989.

Islam:

Al-Hibri, Azizah. Women in Islam. Elmsford, NY: Pergamon Press, 1982.

Atiya, Nayra. Khul-Khaal: Five Egyptian Women Tell Their Stories. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1982.

Badran, Margot and Miriam Cooke, eds. Opening the Gates: A Century of Arab Feminist Writing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990.

Beck, Lois, and Nikki Keddie, eds. Women in the Muslim World. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978.

Bendt, Ingela and James Downing. We Shall Return: Women of Palestine. London: Zed Press; Westport, CT: L. Hill, 1982.

Combs-Schilling, M.E. Sacred Performances: Islam, Sexuality, and Sacrifice. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

El Saadawi, Nawal. The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World. London: Zed Press, 1980.

Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock, ed. Women and the Family in the Middle East: New Voices of Change. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1985.

Fernea, Elizabeth Warnock, and Basima Qattan Bezirgan, eds. Middle Eastern Women Speak. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1977.

Friedl, Erika. Women of Deh Koh: Lives in an Iranian Village. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989.

Ginat, Joseph. Women in Muslim Rural Society: Status and Role in Family and Community. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1982.

Haeri, Shahla. Law of Desire: Temporary Marriage in Shi'I Iran. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1989.

Mernissi, Fatima. Beyond the Veil: Male-Female Dynamics in Modern Muslim Society. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Pub. Co.; New York: Distributed by Halsted Press, 1975.

------. Women and Islam: An Historical and Theological Enquiry. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991.

Myers, Carol L. Discovering Eve: Ancient Israelite Women in Context. NY: Oxford University Press, 1988.

* Nurbakhsh, Javad. Sufi Women. New York: Khaniqahi- Nimatuallahi Publications, 1983.

A collection of stories and legends about famous Sufi women. Stories about Rabe'ah are well represented as are tales of other sufi saints. Sabbah, Fatna A. Woman in the Muslim Unconscious. Translated by Mary Jo Lakeland. New York: Pergamon Press, 1984.

Shaarawi, Huda. Harem Years: The Memoirs of an Egyptian Feminist. Translated by Margot Badran. New York: The Feminist Press at the City of New York, 1987.

Smith, Jane I., ed. Women in Contemporary Muslim Societies. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 1980.

Stern, Geraldine. Israeli Women Speak Out. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1979.

Hinduism:

Beane, Wendell Charles. Myth, Cult and Symbols in Sakta Hinduism: A Study of the Indian Mother Goddess. Leiden: Brill, 1977.

Bennett, Lynn. Dangerous Wives and Sacred Sisters: Social and Symbolic Roles of High-Caste Women in Nepal. New York: Columbia University Press, 1983.

Brown, Cheever Mackenzie. God as Mother: A Feminine Theology in India: An Historical and Theological Study of the Brahmavaivarta Purana. Hartford, VT: C. Stark, 1974.

Bumiller, Elizabeth. May You Be the Mother of a Hundred Sons: A Journey Among the Women of India. New York: Random House, 1990.

Chaudhuri, Dulal. Goddess Durga: The Great Mother. Calcutta: Mrimol; Columbia, MO: Distributed by South Asia Books, 1984.

Coburn, Thomas. Encountering the Goddess: A Translation of the Devi-Mahatmya and a Study of its Interpretation. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991.

------. Devi-Mahatmya: The Crystallization of the Goddess Tradition. Columbia, MO: South Asia Books, 1985.

Eck, Diana L. Darsan, Seeing the Divine Image in India. Chambersburg, PA: Anima Books, 1985.

------. Banaras, City of Light. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983.

Erndl, Kathleen M. Victory to the Mother: The Hindu Goddess of Northwest India in Myth, Ritual, and Symbol. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Fuller, C.J. Servants of the Goddess: The Priests of a South Indian Temple. Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Gatwood, Lynn E. Devi and the Spouse Goddess: Women, Sexuality, and Marriages in India. Riverdale, MD: Riverdale Co., 1985.

Gulati, Leela. Profiles in Female Poverty: A Study of Five Poor Working Women in Kerala. Delhi: Hindustan, 1984.

Hawley, John Stratton and Donna Marie Wulff, eds. The Divine Consort: Radha and the Goddesses of India. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

Jacobson, Coranne and Susan S. Wadley, eds. Women in India: Two Perspectives. Columbia, MO: South Asia Books, 1977.

Kingsley, David R. The Goddesses' Mirror: Visions of the Divine from East and West. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1989.

------. Hindu Goddesses: Visions of the Divine Feminine in the Hindu Religious Tradition. University of California Press, 1986.

------. The Sword and the Flute: Kali and Krsna, Dark Visions of the Terrible and the Sublime in Hindu Mythology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975.

Kishwar, Madhu and Ruth Vanita, eds. In Search of Answers: Indian Women's Voices from "Manushi". London: Zed Center; Totowa, NJ: Biblio Distribution Center, 1984.

Leslie, I. Julia, ed. The Perfect Wife: The Status and Role of the Orthodox Hindu Woman as Described in the Stridharmapaddhati of Tryambakayajvan. Delhi; New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

------, ed. Roles and Rituals for Hindu Women. London: Pinter, 1991.

Lipski, Alexander. Life and Teaching of Sri Anandamayi Ma. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1977.

Maurya, Sahab Deen, ed. Women in India. Allahabad, India: Chugh Publications, 1988.

Mazumdar, Shudha; edited by Geraldine Forbes. Memoirs of an Indian Woman. Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1989.

------. A Pattern of Life: The Memoirs of an Indian Woman. New Delhi: Manohar Book Service, 1977.

Miller, Barbara D. The Endangered Sex: Neglect of Female Children in Rural North India. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.

Obeyesekere, Gananath. The Cult of the Goddess Pattini. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Preston, James. Cult of the Goddess: Social and Religious Change in a Hindu Temple. New Delhi: Vikas, 1980.

Roy, Manisha. Bengali Women. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975.

Shulman, David Dean. Tamil Temple Myths: Sacrifice and Divine Marriage in the South Indian Saiva Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Valentine, Daniel E. Fluid Signs: Being a Person the Tamil Way. Berkeley; London: University of California Press, 1984.

Buddhism:

Allione, Tsultrim. Women of Wisdom. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984.

Aziz, Barbara Nimri. Tibetan Frontier Families: Reflections of Three Generations from D'ing-ri. Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1978.

Beyer, Stephan. Magic and Ritual in Tibet: The Cult of Tara. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1988.

Boucher, Sandy. Turning the Wheel: American Women Creating the New Buddhism. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988.

Dowman, Keith, trans. Sky Dancer. Arkana, 1989.

Friedman, Lenore. Meetings with Remarkable Women: Buddhist Teachers in America. Boston: Shambhala; New York: Distributed in the US by Random House, 1987.

Guisso, Richard and Stanley Johannesen, eds. Women in China: Current Directions in Historical Scholarship. Youngstown, NY: Philo Press, 1981.

Hopkins, Deborah, Michele Hill and Eileen Kiera, eds. Not Mixing Up Buddhism: Essays on Women and Buddhist Practice. Fredonia, NY: White Pine Press, 1986.

Ital, Gerta; trans. by T.M. Green. The Master, the Monks, and I: A Western Woman's Experience of Zen. London: Crucible, 1987.

Karma, Lekshe Tsomo, ed. Sakyadhita: Daughters of the Buddha. Ithaca: Snow Lion Press, 1988.

Kelsang Gyatso. Guide to Dakiniland: A Commentary to the Highest Yoga Tantra Practice of Vajrayogini. London: Tharpa Publications, 1991.

Nam-mkha'i-snying-po; oral trans. by Tarthang Tulka; ed by Jane Wilhelms. Mother of Knowledge: The Enlightenment of Ye- shes mTsho-rgyal. Berkeley: Dharma Pub., 1983.

Pao-ch'ang; trans. by Li Jung-hsi. Biographies of Buddhist Nuns: Pao-chang's Pi-chiu-ni-chuan. Osaka: Tohokai, 1981.

Paul, Diana Y. Women in Buddhism: Images of the Feminine in Mahayana Tradition. Berkeley: Asian Humanities Press, 1979.

Sidor, Ellen S., ed. A Gathering of Spirit: Women Teaching American Buddhism. Cumberland, RI: Primary Point Press, 1987.

Thubten Yeshe. Vajra Yogini: A Commentary on the Anuttarayogatantra Method of Vajra Yogini (The first edited transcript of a course taught from 16th September to 1st October 1979 at Chenrezig Institute, Australia). London: Wisdom Publications, 1984.

Willis, Janice D., ed. Feminine Ground: Essays on Women and Tibet. 1st ed. USA Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion Publications, 1989.

Women of Color:

Richardson, Marilyn. Black Women and Religion: A Bibliography. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1980.

Acosta-Belen, Edna, ed. The Puerto Rican Woman. 2nd Edition: New York: Praeger, 1986.

Amanecida Collective, Carter Heyward, et al. Revolutionary Forgiveness: Feminist Reflection on Nicaragua. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1987.

Andrews, William, ed. Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women's Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986.

Anzaldua, Gloria and Cherrie Moraga, eds. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. 2nd Edition: New York: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983.

Brown, Karen McCarthy. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.

Cannon, Katie G. Black Womanist Ethics. Atlanta, GA: Scholars Press, 1988.

Chung, Hyun Kyun. Struggle to be the Sun Again: Introducing Asian Women's Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1990.

Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race, and Class. New York: Vintage Books, 1983.

Fabella, Virginia and Mercy Amba Oduyoye, eds. With Passion and Compassion: Third World Women Doing Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1988.

Giddings, Paula. When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America. NYC: Bantam Books, 1984.

Golden, Renny. The Hour of the Poor, The Hour of Women: Salvadoran Women Speak. New York: Crossroad, 1991.

Hooks, Bell. Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism. Boston: South End Press, 1984.

------. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. Boston: South End Press, 1984.

------. Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. Boston: South End Press, 1989.

------. Yearning: Race, Gender and Cultural Politics. Boston: South End Press, 1990.

Hull, Gloria T., Patricia Bell Scott and Barbara Smith, eds. All the Women are White, All the Blacks are Men, But Some of Us are Brave: Black Women's Studies. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1982.

Hurston, Zora Neale. The Sanctified Church. Berkeley, CA: Turtle Island, 1983.

Isasi-Diaz, Ada Maria and Yolanda Tarango. Hispanic Women, Prophetic Voice in the Church: Toward a Hispanic Women's Liberation Theology. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988.

Katoppo, Marianne. Compassionate and Free: An Asian Woman's Theology. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1981.

Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1976.

Kuzwayo, Ellen. Call Me Woman. 1st US Edition: San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1985.

Lorde, Audre. Undersong: Chosen Poems: Old and New. Revised Edition: New York: Norton, 1992.

------. Zami, A New Spelling of My Name. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1983.

------. Sister Outsider. Freedom, CA: Crossing Press, 1984.

Low, John C.B. and Ellen Low Webster, eds. The Church and Women in the Third World. Philadelphia: Westminster, 1985.

Mirande, Alfredo and Evangeline Enriquez. La Chicano: The Mexican-American Woman. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979.

Mitchell, Ella Pearson, ed. Those Preachin' Women. Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1985.

Mora, Magdalena and Adelaida Del Castillo, eds. Mexican Women in the U.S.: Struggles Past and Present. Los Angeles: UCLA Chicano Studies Research Center Publications, 1980.

Oduyoye, Mercy Amba. Hearing and Knowing: Theological Reflections on Christianity in Africa. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986.

Papanek, Hanna and Gail Minault, eds. Separate Worlds: Studies of Purdah in South Asia. Columbia, MO: South Asia Books, 1982.

Pobee, John S. and Von Wartenberg-Potter, Barbell, eds. New Eyes For Reading: Biblical and Theological Reflections by Women from the Third World. Bloomington, IN: Meyer Stone Books, 1987.

Rogers-Rose, La Frances, ed. The Black Woman. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage Publications, 1980.

* Sanders, Cheryl J., ed. Living the Intersection: Womanism and Afrocentrism in Theology. Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Press, 1994.

This collection of essays explores the relationship and compatibility between the two perspectives: Womanism and Afrocentrism, two of the most influential currents in contemporary African American life. Under consideration: the liberation of black women, and what the mostly male Afrocentric scholarship contributes toward this liberation.

Smith, Barbara, ed. Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. NY: Kitchen Table, Women of Color Press, 1983.

Steady, Filomina, ed. The Black Woman Cross-Culturally. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman Publications, 1981.

Sterling, D. Black Foremothers: Three Lives. Old Westbury, NY: Feminist Press, 1979.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

------. The Color Purple. NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1982.

Washington, Mary Helen. Invented Lives: Narratives of Black Women, 1860-1960. Garden City, NJ: Anchor Press, 1987.

Weems, Renita J. Just a Sister Away: A Womanist Vision of Women's Relationships in the Bible. San Diego: LuraMedia, 1988.

Wilmore, Gayraud S. and Cone, James, eds. Black Theology: A Documentary History, 1966-1979. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1979. (See Pauli Murray, "Black Theology and Feminist Theology: A Comparative View" and Jacquelyn Grant, "Black Theology and the Black Women.")

Native American:

American Indian Women's Scholarship and Perspectives. Minneapolis, Minn: The Center, 1990.

Critic's Choice:

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

Allen, who is part Laguna Pueblo and Sioux argues that precolonial native cultures in the Americas were primarily matriarchal. Drawing on oral and literary traditions from a variety of tribes (e.g. Laguna, Keres, Aztec, Crow, Hopi, Sioux, Zuni, Cherokee, Maya, Cheyenne, etc.) as well as on history rethought from the Native American perspective, she shows women in their influential days as powerful and highly respected shamans, medicine women, mothers and leaders. With colonization, native cultures were all but destroyed and women's power was lost. Allen sees now, however, in recent Native American literature a recovering of the feminine in American Indian traditions. Selected bibliography included.

Albers, Patricia and Bea Medicine, eds. The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women. Washington, DC: University Press in America, 1983.

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1983.

------, ed. Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

------. Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman's Sourcebook. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.

Andrews, Lynn V. Medicine Woman. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981.

------; illustrations by N. Scott Momaday. Flight of the Seventh Moon: The Teaching of the Shields. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985 (1984).

------. Jaguar Woman and the Wisdom of the Butterfly Tree. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985.

------. Star Woman: We Are Made from Stars and to the Stars We Must Return. New York: Warner Books, 1986.

------. Teachings Around the Sacred Wheel: Finding the Soul of the Dreamtime. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990.

------. The Woman of Wyrrd: The Arousal of the Inner Fire. San Francisco: Harper, 1990.

Bataille, Gretchen M., and Kathleen Mullen Sands. American Indian Women: Telling Their Lives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Brant, Beth, ed. A Gathering of Spirit: A Collection by North American Indian Women. Rockland, Maine: Sinister Wisdom Books, 1984.

Bruchac, Carol, Linda Hogan and Judith McDaniel. The Stories We Hold Secret: Tales of Women's Spiritual Development. The Greenfield Review Press, 1986.

Cameron, Anne. Daughters of Copper Woman. Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1981.

Campbell, Maria. Halfbreed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973.

Conlon, Faith, Rachel da Silva, and Barbara Wilson, eds. The Things That Divide Us: Stories by Women. Seattle: Seal Press, 1985.

Crow Dog, Mary and Richard Erdoes. Lakota Woman. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

Deutrich, Mabel E. and Virginia C. Purdy, eds. Clio Was A Woman: Studies in the History of American Women. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1980.

Devens, Carol. Separate Confrontation: American Indian Women and Christian Mission, 1630-1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Erdrich, Louise. Tracks: A Novel. New York: Henry Holt, 1988.

------. The Beet Queen. New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1986.

------. Love Medicine. New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1984.

Foreman, Carolyn Thomas. Indian Women Chiefs. Washington, DC: Zenger Publishing, 1976.

Green, Rayna, ed. That's What She Said: Contemporary Poetry and Fiction by Native American Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Hale, Janet Campbell. The Jailing of Cecelia Capture. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985.

Hungery Wolf, Beverly. The Ways of My Grandmothers. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1980.

Katz, Jane B., ed. I Am The Fire of Time: The Voices of Native American Women. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977.

Mullet, G.M. Spider Woman Stories: Legends of the Hopi Indians. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979.

Niethammer, Carolyn. Daughters of the Earth: The Lives and Legends of American Indian Women. New York: Collier Books, 1977.

Powers, Marla. Oglala Women: Myth, Ritual, and Reality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Viking Press, 1977.

------. Almanac of the Dead: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991.

Swann, Brian and Arnold Krupt, eds. I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987.

Topahanso, Luci. Seasonal Woman. Santa Fe: Tooth of Time Books, 1982.

Verble, Sedelta, ed. Words of Today's American Indian Women -- Ohoyo Makachi. Wichta Falls, Tex: U.S. Department of Education and Ohoyo Resource Center, 1981.

Walters, Anna Lee. The Sun is Not Merciful. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1985.

Zitkala-Sa. American Indian Stories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.

Native American:

American Indian Women's Scholarship and Perspectives. Minneapolis, Minn: The Center, 1990.

Critic's Choice:

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions. Boston: Beacon Press, 1986.

Allen, who is part Laguna Pueblo and Sioux argues that precolonial native cultures in the Americas were primarily matriarchal. Drawing on oral and literary traditions from a variety of tribes (e.g. Laguna, Keres, Aztec, Crow, Hopi, Sioux, Zuni, Cherokee, Maya, Cheyenne, etc.) as well as on history rethought from the Native American perspective, she shows women in their influential days as powerful and highly respected shamans, medicine women, mothers and leaders. With colonization, native cultures were all but destroyed and women's power was lost. Allen sees now, however, in recent Native American literature a recovering of the feminine in American Indian traditions. Selected bibliography included.

Albers, Patricia and Bea Medicine, eds. The Hidden Half: Studies of Plains Indian Women. Washington, DC: University Press in America, 1983.

Allen, Paula Gunn. The Woman Who Owned the Shadows. San Francisco: Spinsters Ink, 1983.

------, ed. Spider Woman's Granddaughters: Traditional Tales and Contemporary Writing by Native American Women. Boston: Beacon Press, 1989.

------. Grandmothers of the Light: A Medicine Woman's Sourcebook. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.

Andrews, Lynn V. Medicine Woman. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1981.

------; illustrations by N. Scott Momaday. Flight of the Seventh Moon: The Teaching of the Shields. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985 (1984).

------. Jaguar Woman and the Wisdom of the Butterfly Tree. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985.

------. Star Woman: We Are Made from Stars and to the Stars We Must Return. New York: Warner Books, 1986.

------. Teachings Around the Sacred Wheel: Finding the Soul of the Dreamtime. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990.

------. The Woman of Wyrrd: The Arousal of the Inner Fire. San Francisco: Harper, 1990.

Bataille, Gretchen M., and Kathleen Mullen Sands. American Indian Women: Telling Their Lives. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

Brant, Beth, ed. A Gathering of Spirit: A Collection by North American Indian Women. Rockland, Maine: Sinister Wisdom Books, 1984.

Bruchac, Carol, Linda Hogan and Judith McDaniel. The Stories We Hold Secret: Tales of Women's Spiritual Development. The Greenfield Review Press, 1986.

Cameron, Anne. Daughters of Copper Woman. Vancouver: Press Gang Publishers, 1981.

Campbell, Maria. Halfbreed. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1973.

Conlon, Faith, Rachel da Silva, and Barbara Wilson, eds. The Things That Divide Us: Stories by Women. Seattle: Seal Press, 1985.

Crow Dog, Mary and Richard Erdoes. Lakota Woman. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991.

Deutrich, Mabel E. and Virginia C. Purdy, eds. Clio Was A Woman: Studies in the History of American Women. Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1980.

Devens, Carol. Separate Confrontation: American Indian Women and Christian Mission, 1630-1900. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.

Erdrich, Louise. Tracks: A Novel. New York: Henry Holt, 1988.

------. The Beet Queen. New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1986.

------. Love Medicine. New York: Holt, Rhinehart & Winston, 1984.

Foreman, Carolyn Thomas. Indian Women Chiefs. Washington, DC: Zenger Publishing, 1976.

Green, Rayna, ed. That's What She Said: Contemporary Poetry and Fiction by Native American Women. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Hale, Janet Campbell. The Jailing of Cecelia Capture. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985.

Hungery Wolf, Beverly. The Ways of My Grandmothers. New York: William Morrow and Company, Inc., 1980.

Katz, Jane B., ed. I Am The Fire of Time: The Voices of Native American Women. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1977.

Mullet, G.M. Spider Woman Stories: Legends of the Hopi Indians. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1979.

Niethammer, Carolyn. Daughters of the Earth: The Lives and Legends of American Indian Women. New York: Collier Books, 1977.

Powers, Marla. Oglala Women: Myth, Ritual, and Reality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.

Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. New York: Viking Press, 1977.

------. Almanac of the Dead: A Novel. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991.

Swann, Brian and Arnold Krupt, eds. I Tell You Now: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1987.

Topahanso, Luci. Seasonal Woman. Santa Fe: Tooth of Time Books, 1982.

Verble, Sedelta, ed. Words of Today's American Indian Women -- Ohoyo Makachi. Wichta Falls, Tex: U.S. Department of Education and Ohoyo Resource Center, 1981.

Walters, Anna Lee. The Sun is Not Merciful. Ithaca, NY: Firebrand Books, 1985.

Zitkala-Sa. American Indian Stories. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1985.

II. Comparative Studies

Atkinson, Clarissa; Buchanan, Constance; Miles, Margaret, eds. Immaculate and Powerful: The Female in Sacred Image and Social Reality. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985.

Atkinson, Clarissa. Shaping New Vision: Gender and Values in American Culture. The Harvard Women's Studies in Religion Series, vol. 2. Ann Arbor, MI: UNI Research Press, 1987.

Carmody, Denise Lardner. Women & World Religions. Nashville: Abingdon, 1979.

Christ, Carol P. and Plaskow, Judith, eds. Womanspirit Rising: A Feminist Reader. NYC: Harper and Row, 1979.

Cooey, Paula, Mary Ellen Ross, and Sharon Farmer. Embodied Love: Sensuality and Relationship as Feminist Values. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987.

de Silva, Lynn A. The Problem of the Self in Buddhism and Christianity. New York: Barnes and Noble, 1979.

Eck, Diana L. and Devaki Jain, eds. Speaking of Faith: Global Perspectives on Women, Religion and Social Change. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers, 1987.

Falk, Nancy A. and Rita M. Gross, eds. Unspoken Worlds: Women's Religious Lives in Non-Western Cultures. New York: Harper and Row, 1980.

Grant, Jacquelyn. White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1989.

Joseph, Gloria I. and Jill Lewis. Common Differences: Conflicts in Black and White Feminist Perspectives. 2nd. edition. Boston: South End Press, 1986.

King, Ursula, ed. Women in the World's Religions: Past and Present. New York: Paragon House, 1987.

Kraemer, Ross Shepard. Her Share of the Blessings: Women's Religions Among Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Greco- Roman World. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Plaskow, Judith and Carol P. Christ, eds. Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989.

Roiphe, Anne. Generation Without Memory: A Jewish Journey in Christian America. London: Simon and Schuster, 1981.

Sharma, Arvind and Katherine K. Young, eds. The Annual Review of Women in World Religions: Volume 1. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1991.

Sharma, Arvind, ed. Women in World Religions. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1987.

III. Spirituality

Carson, Anne. Feminist Spirituality and the Feminine Divine: An Annotated Bibliography. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press, 1986.

------. Goddesses and Wise Women: The Literature of Feminist Spirituality, 1980-1992: An Annotated Bibliography. Freedom CA: Crossing Press, 1992.

Wynne, Patrice, ed. The Womanspirit Sourcebook: A Catalog of Books, Periodicals, Music, Calendars & Tarot Cards, Organizations, Video & Audio Tapes, Bookstores, Interviews, Meditations, Art. First Edition. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988.

Anderson, Sherry Ruth and Patricia Hopkins. The Feminine Face of God: The Unfolding of the Sacred in Women. New York: Bantam Books, 1991.

Cady, Susan; Ronan, Marian; Taussig, Hal. Sophia: The Future of Feminist Spirituality. NY: Seabury Press, 1986.

------. Wisdom's Feast: Sophia in Study and Celebration. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989.

Carmody, Denise Lardner. Seizing the Apple: A Feminist Spirituality of Personal Growth. New York: Crossroads, 1984.

Chicago, Judy. The Birth Project. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1985.

Christ, Carol P. Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest. Boston: Beacon Press, 1980.

Daly, Mary. Gyn/Ecology: The Metaphysics of Radical Feminism. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978.

------. Pure Lust: Elemental Feminist Philosophy. Boston: Beacon Press, 1984.

------. Outercourse: The Be-Dazzling Voyage. San Francisco: Harper, 1992.

Dillard, Annie. Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. New York: Harper and Row, 1974.

Duck, Ruth, ed. Bread for the Journey: Resources for Worship. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1981.

Duck, Ruth and Michael G. Bausch, eds. Everflowing Streams: Songs for Worship. New York: Pilgrim Press, 1981.

Emswiler, Sharon and Thomas Neufer. Women and Worship. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983.

Giles, Mary E., ed. The Feminist Mystic and Other Essays on Women and Spirituality. New York: Crossroad, 1982.

Hassan, Riffat, Haim Gordon and Leonard Grob, eds. Women's and Men's Liberation: Testimonies of Spirit. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991.

Hosmer, Rachael. Gender and God: Love and Desire in Christian Spirituality. Cowley Publications, 1986.

Inglehart, Hallie. Womanspirit. NY: Harper and Row, 1983.

Kalven, Janet and Buckley, Mary, eds. Women's Spirit Bonding. NY: Pilgrim Press, 1984.

Luke, Helen M. Woman: Earth and Spirit. The Feminine in Symbol and Myth. New York: Crossroad, 1981. O'Flaherty, Wendy Doniger. Women, Androgynes, and Other Mythical Beasts. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Oliver, Mary. Dream Work. New York: The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1986.

------. House of Light. Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.

Porterfield, Amanda. Feminine Spirituality in America: From Sarah Edwards to Martha Graham. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1980.

Sewell, Marilyn, ed. Cries of the Spirit: A Celebration of Women's Spirituality. Boston: Beacon Press, 1991.

Spretnak, Charlene, ed. The Politics of Women's Spirituality: Essays on the Rise of Spirityal Power Within the Feminist Movement. New York: Anchor Books, 1982.

Umansky, Ellen M. and Dianne Ashton, eds. Four Centuries of Jewish Women's Spirituality: A Sourcebook. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992.

Walker, Barbara G. The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1983.

------. The Woman's Dictionary of Symbols and Sacred Objects. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988.

Winter, Miriam Therese. Resources for Ritual: Woman Prayer Woman Song. New York: Crossroad, 1991.

Zahava, Irene, ed. Hear Her Silence: Stories by Women of Myth, Magic and Renewal. Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1986.

IV. Goddess Religions and Witchcraft

Adler, Margot. Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess- Worshippers and Other Pagans in America Today. New York: Viking Press, 1979.

Arthur, Rose. The Wisdom Goddess: Feminine Motifs in Eight Nag Hammadi Documents. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1984.

Berger, Pamela. The Goddess Obscured: Transformation of the Grain Protectoress from Goddess to Saint. Boston: Beacon Press, 1985.

Budapest, Zsuzsanna. The Holy Book of Women's Mysteries, pts. 1 & 2. LA: Susan B. Anthony Coven, No. 1, 1979.

------. Grandmother Moon: Lunar Magic in Our Lives: Spells, Rituals, Goddesses, Legends, and Emotions Under the Moon. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1991.

Cameron, Anne. Earth Witch. Madeira Park, British Columbia, Canada: Harbour Publishing, 1985.

Cantarella, Eva. Pandora's Daughters: The Role and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

Christ, Carol P. Laughter of Aphrodite: Reflections on the Journey to the Goddess. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1987.

Condren, Mary. The Serpent and the Goddess: Women, Religion, and Power in Celtic Ireland. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989.

Daly, Mary. Webster's First New Intergalactic Wickedary of the Engligh Language. Boston: Beacon Press, 1987.

Downing, Christine. The Goddess: Mythological Representations of the Feminine. NY: Crossroad, 1981.

------. Women's Mysteries: Toward a Poetics of Gender. NY: Crossroad, 1992.

DuBois, Page. Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1982.

Englesman, Joan Chamberlain. The Feminine Dimension of the Divine. Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1979.

Farrer, Janet and Stewart. The Witches Goddess. Custer, WA: Phoenix Publications, 1987.

Frymer-Kensky, Tikva. In the Wake of the Goddesses: Women, Culture, and the Biblical Transformation of Pagan Myth. New York: Free Press, 1992.

Gadon, Elinor. The Once and Future Goddess. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989.

Gardner, Gerald. High Magic's Aid. New York: Weiser, 1975.

Giles, Mary E. The Feninist Mysitc and Other Essays on Woman and Spirituality. New York: Crossroad, 1982.

Gimbutas, Marija. In All Her Names: Four Explorations of the Feminine in Divinity. Edited by Joseph Campnell and Charles Muses. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1991.

------. The Language of the Goddess: Unearthing the Hidden Symbols of Western Civilization. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1989.

Johnson, Buffie. Lady of the Beasts: Ancient Images of the Goddess and Her Sacred Animals. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988.

Keuls, Eva C. The Reign of the Phallus: Sexual Politics in Ancient Athens. New York: Harper and Row, 1985.

Kraemer, Ross S., ed. Maenads, Martyrs, Matrons, Monastics: A Sourcebook on Women's Religions in the Greco-Roman World. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988.

Mascetti, Manuela Dunn. The Song of Eve: An Illustrated Journey into the Myths, Symbols, and Rituals of the Goddess. NY: Simon and Schuster, 1990.

Monaghan, Patricia. The Book of Goddesses and Heroines. NY: E.P. Dutton, 1981.

Murdock, Maureen. The Heroine's Journey. Boston; London: Shambala Publications, Inc., 1990.

Noble, Vicki. Motherpeace: A Way to the Goddess Through Myth, Art and Tarot. NY: Harper and Row, 1983.

Oda, Mayumi. Goddesses. Volcano, CA: Volcano Press, 1988.

Olsen, Carl, ed. The Book of the Goddess Past and Present: An Introduction to Her Religion. New York: Crossroad, 1992.

Orlock, Carol. The Goddess Letters: The Myth of Demeter and Persephone Retold. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987.

Piercy, Marge. The Moon is Always Female. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Distributed by Random House, 1987.

Preston, James J., ed. Mother Worship: Theme and Variations. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982.

Reed, Ellen Cannon. The Witches Quabala: The Goddess and the Tree. St Paul, MN: Llewellyn Publications, 1986.

Sheba, Lady. The Book of Shadows. St. Paul, MN: Llewellyn, 1973.

Spretnak, Charlene, ed. Lost Goddesses of Early Greece. Boston: Beacon Press, 1978.

Starhawk. The Spiral Dance: A Rebirth of the Ancient Religion of the Goddess. NY: Harper and Row, 1979.

------. Dreaming the Dark: Magic, Sex, and Politics. Boston: Beacon Press, 1982.

------. Truth or Dare: Encounters with Power, Authority and Mystery. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1990.

Valiente, Doreen. Natural Magic. Custer, WA: Phoenix Press, 1978.

------. Witchcraft for Tomorrow. Custer, WA: Phoenix Press, 1978.

------. An ABC of Witchcraft, Past and Present. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1973.

Walker, Barbara G. The I Ching of the Goddess. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1986.

------. The Skeptical Feminist: Discovering the Virgin, Mother and Crone. San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988.

Weigle, Marta. Spiders and Spinsters: Women and Mythology. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1982.

Weinstein, Marion. Earth Magic: A Dianic Book of Shadows. Custer, WA: Phoenix Publishing, 1986.

------. Positive Magic: Occult Self Help. Custer, WA: Phoenix Publishing, 1984.

Whitmont, Edward C. Return of the Goddess. New York: Crossroad, 1982.

Wolkstein, Diane and Samuel Noah Kramer. Inanna, Queen of Heaven and Earth: Her Stories and Hymns from Sumer. New York: Harper and Row, 1983.

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