The Religious Imagination of American Women.

Lindley, Susan Hill

The Religious Imagination of American Women. By Mary Farrell Bednarowski. Religion in North America. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. xiv + 240 pp. $39.95 cloth; $15.95 paper.

This provocative and fascinating study surveys women's religious thought in America during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Bednarowski's response to her central question--"when women write and speak publicly about religious ideas, what do they have to say?" (1)--is organized around five themes: ambivalence, immanence, the ordinary as revelatory of the sacred, ultimate reality as relational, and physical and spiritual healing. Yet merely listing the themes does little justice to the complexity with which each idea is developed. "Creative ambivalence," initially related in chapter 2 to women's sense of being both "insiders" and "outsiders" in their own traditions, resurfaces in chapter 4 on the sacred and the ordinary, as feminists both affirm valuable aspects of "women's sphere" and reject prescriptive and confining gender roles. Chapter 6 on healing deals less with rituals and practices than with "women's expansion of `healing' as a fruitful religious idea ... whose many meanings go far beyond the merely palliative" (150). In consistently lucid prose, Bednarowski draws on popular and scholarly women's writing and, in the process of elucidating her five interrelated themes, provides a thought-provoking and cogent survey of feminist theology in recent decades. Bednarowski is careful neither to assume a commonality to "women's" thought that obscures significant differences shaped by class, race, and tradition nor to claim that these themes are exclusive to women, even though they seem to be particularly compelling, stimulating, and fruitful for contemporary women. The result is a stimulating look at women's religious thought at the "in-between-times" of American culture and religion, "past the early years of uncomplicated outrage on the part of women and well into a deep awareness of the precariousness and longevity of the struggle for full participation" (177).

Susan Hill Lindley
Saint Olaf College