“In Goddess religion death is not feared, but is understood to be a part of life, followed by birth and renewal.” -Carol P. Christ
Carol Patrice Christ died peacefully on July 14 from cancer. Carol was and will remain one of the foremothers and most brilliant voices of the Women’s Spirituality movement. At the conference on “The Great Goddess Re-Emerging” at the University of California at Santa Cruz in the spring of 1978, Carol delivered the keynote address, “Why Women Need the Goddess: Phenomenological, Psychological, and Political Reflections.”
Christ proposed four compelling reasons why women might turn to the Goddess: the affirmation and legitimation of female power as beneficent; affirmation of the female body and its life cycles; affirmation of women’s will; and affirmation of women’s bonds with one another and their positive female heritage (Christ 1979).
Carol graduated from Yale University with a PhD in Religious Studies and went on to teach as a feminist scholar of women and religion, women’s spirituality, and Goddess studies, at institutions including Columbia University, Harvard Divinity School, Pomona College, San Jose State University, and the California Institute of Integral Studies, where she was an adjunct professor since the inception of the Women’s Spirituality, Philosophy and Religion graduate studies program in 1993. Christ published eight profoundly thoughtful and inspiring books, several in collaboration with her friend and colleague Judith Plaskow, whom she met at Yale:
- Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest (1986)
- Woman Spirit Rising: A Feminist Reader in Religion, anthology co-edited with Judith Plaskow (1992)
- Odyssey with the Goddess: A Spiritual Quest in Crete (1995)
- Weaving the Visions: New Patterns in Feminist Spirituality. Anthology co-edited with Judith Plaskow (1989)
- Laughter of Aphrodite: Reflections on a Journey to the Goddess (1987)
- Rebirth of the Goddess: Finding Meaning in Feminist Spirituality (1998)
- She Who Changes: Re-imaging the Divine in the World (2004)
- Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology. Co-authored with Judith Plaskow (2016)
- A recent interview conducted by Anne Gauldin and Cheri Gaulke, October 19, 2019, Zaros, Heraklion region, Crete, Greece
