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Letter to Carol Christ (1998).
 

I very much enjoyed your book Rebirth of the Goddess ( a review of Carol's later book She Who Changes is here) as a clear view of goddess religion. I have my personal difficulties with deriving any kind of ethos from Goddess spirituality, as a lot of the time I see Her as "all that is, was, and ever will be", and "all" must mean all, not just all that is good. Of course, there's also quite a bit of the time when I feel that spirituality and politics (or ethics) must belong together — I said in one article on the subject (politics and spirituality) that politics without spirituality is dead, while spirituality without politics has never been alive. It's a hard problem, and I'm quite confused about it. Currently on one of the e-mail mailing lists there is a discussion of the problem of evil, and how a Goddess religion can deal with it — several people on the list are reading your book or are about to read it.

The bit that worries me more in general is when you say (page 90) that the Goddess is "the tallest redwood and the tiniest hummingbird…" Of course that's so. But She is also poison ivy, ticks and mosquitoes, malaria parasites, etc. I feel it diminishes our understanding of Her if it is confined to those beings that give us pleasure. But perhaps we are so new at understanding our connection with the creatures of the earth that to begin with we have to look only at the pleasanter aspects; it may be too much to take in the unpleasant ones all at once.

© Daniel Cohen

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