Gaia & God

Alternate Titles

• Gaia and God.

Description

In her most significant work to date, Rosemary Radford Ruether sifts through the legacy of the Christian and Western cultural heritage - the beliefs and stories that have influenced our relationships with each other and with the earth - to illuminate future models for earth healing. "Ecological healing is a theological and psychic-spiritual process," writes Ruether. Although she examines the Western patriarchal tradition from an ecofeminist perspective, Ruether insists. That "classical traditions did not only sacralize patriarchal hierarchy over women, workers, and the earth. They also struggled with what they perceived to be injustice and sin and sought to create just and loving relations between people in their relation to the earth and to the divine. Some of this effort to name evil and struggle against it reinforced relations of domination and created victim-blaming spiritualities and ethics. But there are also glimpses in this. Heritage of transformative, biophilic relationships. These glimpses are a precious legacy that needs to be separated from the toxic waste of sacralized domination." Ruether sees the work of eco-justice and the work of spirituality as interrelated, the inner and outer aspects of one process of conversion and transformation. In juxtaposing the terms Gaia and God in the title of this book, she explores crucial issues surrounding the relationship between the living planet. Earth, and our Western religious traditions. Gaia is the Greek earth goddess, and a term adopted by biologists such as James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in reference to their thesis that the entire planet is a living system behaving as a unified organism. Growing numbers of people have begun to see the Jewish and Christian male monotheistic God as a destructive concept that rationalizes alienation from and neglect of the earth, while Gaia, as an immanent divinity, is seen. As the all-nurturing earth mother goddess. Ruether points out that merely replacing a transcendent male deity with a female one does not answer the "god-problem." What we need, in her view, is a vision of a much more abundant and creative source of life. "A healed relation to each other and to the earth calls for a new consciousness, a new symbolic culture and spirituality." writes Ruether. "We need to transform our inner psyches and the way we symbolize the. Interrelations of men and women, humans and earth, humans and the divine, the divine and the earth." Gaia and God is a major critical work by an internationally acclaimed writer and teacher. It is a sweeping ecofeminist theology that argues for healing relationships between men and women, classes and nations, and humans and the earth.

Subjects

Other Editions

• Gaia & God: an ecofeminist theology of earth healingHarperSanFrancisco1992-01-01
• Gaia and GodHarperSanFrancisco1992-01-01