IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/pal/palchp/978-1-137-12074-8_8.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Cutting “God” Down to Size

In: Women and the Divine

Author

Listed:
  • Mike King

Abstract

For a proper understanding of the spiritual life and the nature of, and possibilities for, women’s spirituality, we need a broader language of the spiritual than monotheism can provide. The very term “transcendence” illustrates this because in the Christian tradition it tends to have meaning in binary opposition to “immanence” and refers to characteristics of “God,” whereas in Eastern traditions—to the extent that translation can succeed in finding corresponding concepts—it means something closer to the “nondual” or “unitive.” The “God” — language of the West has created a limitation of understanding, both within religious and within secular communities, the latter inheriting the equation “religion = God” and therefore remaining ignorant of nonmonotheistic religions. “God” is a construct peculiar to Abrahamic text-oriented monotheism, and it needs to be cut down to size, allowing other religious frameworks space. This means that questions of spirituality and religion need additional, equally powerful, terms to fill the gap. For women’s spirituality, the issue is partly that “God” is an inevitably gendered term: monotheism constructs a male “God,” served historically by a male priesthood.

Suggested Citation

  • Mike King, 2009. "Cutting “God” Down to Size," Palgrave Macmillan Books, in: Gillian Howie & J’annine Jobling (ed.), Women and the Divine, chapter 0, pages 153-170, Palgrave Macmillan.
  • Handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-12074-8_8
    DOI: 10.1007/978-1-137-12074-8_8
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-137-12074-8_8. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.palgrave.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.