Gaia & God

by Rosemary Radford Ruether

In her most significant work to date, Rosemary Radford Ruether sifts through the legacy of the Christian and Western cultural heritage - the beliefs and stories that have influenced our relationships with each other and with the earth - to illuminate future models for earth healing. "Ecological healing is a theological and psychic-spiritual process," writes Ruether. Although she examines the Western patriarchal tradition from an ecofeminist perspective, Ruether insists. That "classical traditions did not only sacralize patriarchal hierarchy over women, workers, and the earth. They also struggled with what they perceived to be injustice and sin and sought to create just and loving relations between people in their relation to the earth and to the divine. Some of this effort to name evil and struggle against it reinforced relations of domination and created victim-blaming spiritualities and ethics. But there are also glimpses in this. Heritage of transformative, biophilic relationships.