Best 20 quotes of Carol P. Christ on MyQuotes

At first the ancient images of the Goddess did not interest me.

Because religion has such a compelling hold on the deep psyches of so many people, feminists cannot afford to leave it in the hands of the fathers.

Beliefs and values that have held sway for thousands of years will be questioned as never before.

I first became interested in women and religion when I was one of the few women doing graduate work in Religious Studies at Yale University in the late 1960's.

If we do not mean that God is male when we use masculine pronouns and imagery, then why should there be any objections to using female imagery and pronouns as well?

In Goddess religion death is not feared, but is understood to be a part of life, followed by birth and renewal.

In Old Europe and Ancient Crete, women were respected for their roles in the discovery of agriculture and for inventing the arts of weaving and pottery making.

Our great symbol for the Goddess is the moon, whose three aspects reflect the three stages in women's lives and whose cycles of waxing and waning coincide with women's menstrual cycles.

Subversive language, however, must be constantly reinvented, because it is continually being co-opted by the powerful.

Symbol systems cannot simply be rejected; they must be replaced. Where there is no replacement, the mind will revert to familiar structures at times of crisis, bafflement, or defeat.

The Goddess of Old Europe and Ancient Crete represented the unity of life in nature, delight in the diversity of form, the powers of birth, death and regeneration.

The mother must socialize her daughter to become subordinate to men, and if her daughter challenges patriarchal norms, the mother is likely to defend the patriarchal structures against her own daughters.

Theologians frequently assert that God has no body, no gender, no race and no age. Most people state that God is neither male nor female. Yet most people become flustered, upset or even angry when it is suggested that the God they know as Lord and Father might also be God the Mother, or Goddess.

The simple act of telling a woman's story from a woman's point of view is a revolutionary act: it never has been done before.

The simplest and most basic meaning of the symbol of the Goddess is the acknowledgment of the legitimacy of female power as a beneficent and independent power.

The women's movement will present a growing threat to patriarchal religion less by attacking it than by simply leaving it behind.

Throughout the years, many Christian women have told me of their great respect for the bravery and courage evident in my work, perhaps even gesturing to their own Isis earrings or a Nile River Goddess pendants.

Women must be the spokesmen for a new humanity arising out of the reconciliation of spirit and body.

Man" it was said, had two natures, a rational nature and an animal or bodily nature. These two natures, it was thought, were continually at war with each other. Whereas reason should have been able to rule the body, all too often, it seemed, the body asserted its own needs and desires. The practice of asceticism, in the East as well as the West, arose out of the attempt to control the unruly body through denial and sometimes punishment. While women also practiced asceticism, the literature of asceticism, written primarily by men, is filled with images equating the temptations of the body with women and the female body. Instead of accepting the changing body as part of the self, asceticism attempted to deny it. Great cruelty to the self and the body have al too often been the fruits of this view.

To put it simply, for Plato change equals death and decay. Since the body is the location of death and decay, the human body and all bodies were found lacking. Plato found change so problematic that he imagined divine power existing totally apart from the changing world, as we have seen. God not only did not have a body; he was also separate from all bodies. This is the first theological mistake.