The Religious Imagination of American Women is an exploration of five ideas that have become particularly powerful catalysts in the theological imaginations of women in many difference communities. These are ambivalence toward their traditions; the immanence, or indwelling, of the divine; the sacredness of the ordinary and the ordinariness of the sacred; relationality as at the root of reality; and healing as a central function of religion.
Because these ideas are more evocative than prescriptive and not confined to any one religious tradition, they have given rise to a multiplicity of interpretations rather than to any one set of religious claims. Jewish and Roman Catholic women, Buddhist, Mormon, and Protestant (liberal and, to a lesser degree, conservative), spiritual feminists, and members of different racial and ethnic communities all reflect in varying ways on these ideas, depending upon what is at stake theologically and culturally in their particular communities.
Taken altogether, the fruits of many different women’s religious thought offer some clues as to how the entry of women into the public arena of theological creativity may be shaping American religious ideas and world views at the end of the twentieth century. At its broadest, this book offers a multi-voiced response to the question: “When women across many traditions are heard speaking theologically, publicly and self-consciously as women, what do they have to say?”