Literary art that is identifiably feminist approaches reality from a feminist perspective and endorses female experience. A feminist perspective demystifies patriarchal assumptions about the nature of human beings, their relation to nature, and the relation of physical and moral qualities to each other. To endorse female experience, the artist must defy or stretch traditional literary conventions, which often means offending or alienating readers. Traditional literary conventions are rooted in philosophical assumptions several thousand years old and still widely current. A third (...) principle of feminist art-which not all feminists subscribe to-is accessibility. When feminist art is difficult, the reason usually lies not in purposeful obfuscation, but in the poverty of our language of feeling, and the difficulty of rendering feeling. (shrink)

This text explores the intersection of the women's spirituality and sex worker's rights movements in which a growing body of sex workers describe and experience themselves as "sacred whores." In this cultural encounter, the women's spirituality movement's vision of sexual empowerment has merged with the sex workers rights movement's recontextualization of prostitution and other forms of sex work as valid, fulfilling, and skilled labor. These women are establishing themselves as heirs to a mythology of ancient religious practices in which priestesses (...) made love to men within temples as a holy rite and a spiritual service. My exploration of this movement is grounded in an inquiry into the history and mythology of the "temple prostitutes" of the ancient Near East, and unfolds into an ethnography of the currently emerging sacred whore movement. (shrink)

There is a device used particularly in Orthodox Christian theology known as apophatic theology. In this God is spoken of only in 'negating concepts' to emphasize the inability of language to adequately describe the nature of deity. My question is whether there is any way in which this concept, used as it is to underline the 'otherness' of a transcendental god, can be applied to a thealogy of Goddess. This'way of negation' figures prominently in mystical theology, where it is often (...) associated with the 'way of union'. Historically, many mystics believed in the possibility of a true union with God achieved through a vision of divine light. This light leads us towards Sophia, or Wisdom, arguably an ancient goddess predating the Jewish Yhwh. Thus theology and thealogy can be reconciled in this concept of light traced back to its pagan beginnings and apophasty can be applied to an 'intransitive' goddess such as Nisaba-Nidaba. (shrink)

Herennius Philo of Byblos is the subject of a notice in the Suda, which states that he was a grammarian born in Nero's time who lived to such an advanced age that he was still composing works in the reign of Hadrian. The titles listed include: On the Acquisition and Choice of Books; On Cities and their Eminent Citizens; and On the Reign of Hadrian . His name, like that of Flavius Josephus, could imply the patronage of a Roman family; (...) we may suppose that, like Porphyry and Maximus of Tyre, he was a Phoenicean by origin who had adopted the tongue and culture of the Greeks. (shrink)

In this article, I trace my story from Jewish ‘war baby’ to thealogian embracing Goddess talk; a search for spirituality, as well as for roots. I explore, in particular, Asherah, whom I accept as the Hebrew Goddess, and I share some of the insights of academics who illuminated my path. I also touch on the latest DNA evidence for the origins of Ashkenazi Jewry and my own search for identity.

:This article has a dual purpose. On the one hand, I propose a Gnostic reading of Krzysztof Kieślowski's The Double Life of Véronique. In this interpretation, the figure of the puppeteer, who is eventually revealed to be the maker of the film's story, stands for the Gnostic demiurge. He creates puppet-people only to discard and sacrifice them when he is done performing. On the other hand, I use the film as a springboard for launching a broader philosophical conversation, existentialist in (...) nature, on the notion of world as farce. Participants in this conversation are figures such as Schopenhauer, Dostoevsky and Cioran. Weronika's sacrifice is discussed from these two complementary standpoints. (shrink)

Compassion is a sign of superficiality: broken destinies and unrelenting misery either make you scream or turn you to stone. Pity is not only inefficient; it is also insulting. And besides, how can you pity another when you yourself suffer ignominiously? Compassion is as common as it is because it does not bind you to anything! Nobody in this world has yet died from another's suffering. And the one who said that he died for us did not die; he was (...) killed. (E. M. Cioran, On the Heights of Despair). (shrink)

In Against the Spiritual Turn: Marxism, Realism and Critical Theory Sean Creaven sets out to reject Christian theism on materialist grounds. This paper critiques Creaven’s argument from a critically realist Trinitarian Christian standpoint. His failure to engage with Christian theologians, philosophers and biblical scholars, on the a priori ground that since Christianity is inherently irrational Christian scholarship must also be inherently irrational, effectively locks his argument in a vicious intellectual circle. His self-imposed alienation from Christian scholarship generates an ideologically driven (...) thesis of questionable academic integrity. This methodological failure is exacerbated by his preference for inductive and deductive reasoning over a critically realistic retroductive epistemology. (shrink)