Institute for Thealogy & Deasophy

Carol P. Christ
PhD


I am a pioneer in the study of Women and Religion and Goddess Thealogy and Philosophy of Religion. I founded the Women's Caucus in the AAR and SBL and was co-chair of the Women and Religion section of the AAR. I have written Diving Deep and Surfacing, Laughter of Aphrodite, Odyssey with the Goddess, Rebirth of the Goddess, and She Who Changes. I am co-editor with Judith Plaskow of the widely-used Womanspirit Rising and Weaving the Visions. I have taught at Wesleyan, Columbia, San Jose State, Harvard Divinity School, Pomona College, Claremont Graduate School, and other universities and seminaries. In 1987, despairing of finding a better job in the field of Religious Studies because my work was too "radical," I resigned a tenured full professorship at San Jose State and moved to Greece. Currently I am Adjunct Professor of Women's Spirituality at California Institute of Integral Studies where I teach on-line courses and Director of Ariadne Institute, through which I lead Goddess Pilgrimages to Crete (www.goddessariadne.org). I have long been active in a variety of anti-racist, anti-war, anti-nuclear, social justice, environmental, and feminist causes. I live in a stone "archontiko" house in Molivos, Lesbos, Greece. I am now a citizen of my adopted land (as well as of the US where I was born). I am also an avid gardener and birdwatcher.

In 1997 I published Rebirth of the Goddess, the first Goddess thealogy. I wrote this book in isolation in Greece in pre-internet years, not knowing if it was possible to write a theo-a-logy without revelation or tradition to refer to. Judith Plaskow read the book while I wrote it, and after finishing it, I sent a draft to former Harvard colleagues Gordon Kaufman and John Cobb (who was visiting the same year I was) with the goal of finding out if what I had written qualified as theology. To my delight Gordon Kaufman appreciated my "constructive" and "constructed" theology and John Cobb declared that my thealogy was "process." Cobb was especially pleased that I had constructed a process theology for the most part without reference to process philosophy or process theology. Cobb's comments led me to read process philosophy, especially the works of Charles Hartshorne, and to write She Who Changes, a feminist process philosophy of religion which was published in 2003.

In 1999, partly inspired by Hartshorne's essay "Do Birds Enjoy Singing," I discovered that Lesbos has the most important wetlands in the Aegean and I became a birdwatcher. One of my first encounters was with a black stork in the channels of the salt pans of Kalloni. In the next years I began to notice degradation of the wetlands and in 2001 I drafted a petition aimed at saving them that was signed by many birdwatchers and others. This led to the founding of Friends of Green Lesbos (www.greenlesbos.org ) and our now decade-long struggle to protect the wetlands of Lesbos. I have written some 40 or 50 complaints of degradation of individual wetlands and have spent the past two years writing an extensive complaint with hundreds of pages of documentation to the European Commission charging degradation of the wetlands of Lesbos protected under the Natura 2000 European Community law. This Complaint is nearly finished and will be signed by WWF Greece and Greek Ornithological Society. The good and bad news is that the European Commission recently charged Greece with failure to enforce the Natura law in general so they will be "receptive" to our complaint and also that since Greece has no money to pay any more fines, they will be in a "mood" to comply.

In recent years I have written "Ecofeminism, Goddess Feminism, and Process-Relational Philosophies" (supposed to have been published in a volume arising from the 6th International Whitehead Conference, but I have been unable to verify this), "The Last Dualism: Life and Death in Goddess Feminist Thealogy" (submitted to Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion), "The Road Not Taken: The Rejection of Goddesses in Judaism and Christianity" (in Patriarchs, Prophets, and Other Villains), "Humanity in the Web of Life" (with Kathryn Rountree) in Environmental Ethics 28/2), and "Embodied, Embedded Mysticism: Affirming the Self and Others in a Radically Independent World" (published in shortened version in JFSR 24/2).

My next project will be to write the story of my environmental work in Lesbos for the "Living it Out" section of the JFSR. After that, who knows? I will probably write a book combining the insights in the above essays. However, I am deterred by the fact that the audience for the kind of books I write appears to be shrinking.