WHEN ASKED IF I would review Carol Christ and Judith Plaskow’s book Goddess and God in the World: Conversations in Embodied Theology, my first reason for agreeing to do so was one of gratitude. Quite apart from their respective books, Plaskow’s classic article “The Right Question is Theological” (1983) and Christ’s “Why Women Need the Goddess” (1978) laid the critical foundations of my academic career as a feminist theologian and scholar of religion..
I first came across these articles in 1990, close to a decade after I had finished my undergraduate studies. I was probably the first Jewish woman to be awarded a degree in Christian theology at Oxford, having applied in the hope that the course would be imbued with a sense of the numinous that had been notable only by its absence in my secular Jewish home. With a place at Trinity College, which had only begun...
