Rating: 
Summary: At the Root of this Longing
Review: A wonderful and thought-provoking book full of insight. A must read for anyone with intelligent questions about spirituality, feminism and religion. As a Jewish woman, I found I could relate to this book and I would recommend it highly. I was able to use information from this book to find my path in feminism and Judaism. Thank you to Carol Lee Flinders!
Rating:
Summary: At the Root of this Longing
Review: A wonderful and thought-provoking book full of insight. A must read for anyone with intelligent questions about spirituality, feminism and religion. As a Jewish woman, I found I could relate to this book and I would recommend it highly. I was able to use information from this book to find my path in feminism and Judaism. Thank you to Carol Lee Flinders!
Rating: 
Summary: Best-selling Author and Professor Explores the Paradox
Review: After living through the sixties and seventies in a spiritual community of work and service where meditative practices defined, nourished, and sustained her very being, Carol Lee Flinders experienced an awakening. She heard the clamoring bells of feminism and glimpsed its imminent clash with her spiritual practice. AT THE ROOT OF THIS LONGING: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger with a Feminist Thirst (March 13, 1998; $21.00; Cloth) is the memoir of her journey to understand what seemed to be irreconcilable. What does spirituality look like when it coexists with feminism's sharp critical faculties? And what does feminism do when it is steeped in spiritual perspectives? Author of the critically acclaimed Enduring Grace and co-author of the best-selling cookbook Laurel's Kitchen, Carol Lee Flinders has written a poignant and deeply moving memoir of her internal battle to find her way as a woman and a genuine spiritual seeker. "I feel as though I am looking at two distinct cultures, with two sets of values, for whom the same world could well have two different meanings." In AT THE ROOT OF THIS LONGING, Flinders identifies and explores four key points at which the path of spirituality and feminism collide: · Vowing Silence vs Finding Voice How does one reconcile the spiritual practice of being silent and stilling the mind with the feminist practice of finding a voice and making oneself heard in the halls of oppressive institutions? · Relinquishing Ego vs Establishing Self How does one reconcile the spiritual discipline of putting oneself last and unseating the ego with the feminist call to "know who you are" and establish and live up to one's authentic identity? · Resisting Desire vs Reclaiming the Body How does one reconcile the spiritual practice of re-channeling one's desires and disidentifying with one's senses with the feminist insistence on reclaiming the body and its desires from all those who objectify and demean it? · Enclosure vs Freedom How is one to reconcile the discipline of turning inward and disentangling oneself from external and public activity with the feminist discipline of moving freely and "taking back the streets"? Flinders finds inspiration in the enrapturing metaphor of Draupadi-the beautiful, competent, and wise princes-goddess who was known to be extremely devout and proficient in the spiritual disciplines from the great Hindu epic the Mahabharata-who fell into a meditative dance causing her sari to endlessly unfurl as her aggressors attempted to harm her, to forge her conciliatory path. AT THE ROOT OF THIS LONGING is a fascinating chronicle of the "synchronicities" that Flinders finds on her inner pilgrimage. What she discovers is that, like some of the medieval women mystics such as Julian of Norwich and spiritual teachers such as Ghandi, is that there is a well of strength, courage, and creativity within that can be drawn from through spiritual practice. "We must be capable of speaking from real depths. To be truly and effectively open toward one another, women must find their way into a genuine, active interior life. Through prayer and meditation practiced in disciplined, systematic ways, women can ground themselves in the interior and exterior life-spirit, mind, and body." AT THE ROOT OF THIS LONGING re-focuses feminism over and against its traditional rejection of spirituality and finds its true strength as a resistance movement based in sacred. * * * CAROL LEE FLINDERS is co-author of the best-selling vegetarian cookbook Laurel's Kitchen and has written about food for newspapers and magazines for over 12 years. In 1993, she published the critically acclaimed Enduring Grace: Living Portraits of Seven Women Mystics. She is an adjunct professor of writing and comparative literature at the University of California at Berkeley. She lives with her husband and son at the Blue Mountain Center of Meditation, located near Petaluma, California.
Rating: 
Summary: lots to think about
Review: Carol Lee Flinders has embarked on the difficult task of reconciling feminism and spirituality. She, like several other scholars and writers today, recognizes the conflict between these two concepts and also the attraction each has for women. Flinders does a fine job outlining the tensions between feminism and spirituality, including the tension between finding voice and reveling in silence. Her ideas are cross-cultural and sweeping and lead to interesting and insightful connections; her probing of both Ghandi's ideas and the myths of Christian saints offers wonderful complications to the text. She depends too heavily on restating Gerda Lerner's work--I highly recommend readers read Lerner's The Creation of Patriarchy and The Creation of Feminist Consciousness themselves because these histories are well-written and important--though it becomes integral to Flinders' approach. The end of At the Root of This Longing loses its balance a bit and falls into unchecked essentialism, sentimentality, and optimism. However, overall, Flinders does important and articulate work for today's thinking, searching women and rightly emphasizes a balance between the personal and the political. She also points out the importance of working toward reconciliation for future generations.
Rating:
Summary: important, compelling and transformative book
Review: Carol Lee Flinders has written a very important book, one that I hope will capture the public's imagination as it has mine. I'm sharing my copy with everybody! I heard Ms. Flinders speak at a conference in July and felt compelled to buy her book, as I failed to see how Catholic women mystics could hold the key to emancipation from our (Western) modern, masculine culture and Judeo-Christian religions. Weaving the personal with the political and then proving that those paradigms are just constructs of the mind, Ms. Flinders shows us all - men and women - how feminism and true spirituality seek the same thing: more humanity, more love, more compassion, more attention and more care of humans for the earth and for each other. I sincerely hope men don't feel excluded by the word "feminism", as this book pertains as much to them as to any woman. My thanks to Carol Lee Flinders.
Rating:
Summary: A personal portrait of struggle, reconciliation, and hope.
Review: Feminism and spirituality are at the heart of a personal struggle through which the author gracefully leads the reader. The two systems, often polarized against each other, are reconciled over the course of a lifetime of meditation and activism. A student and scholar in her own right of women mystics and mystical literature, the author demonstrates that these God-seekers offer hope and lessons which can nourish feminism. The sacred feminine principle holds one key to a potentially brighter future for feminism. There is no preachiness here, no prescribed methodology, because it is recognized that all are part of the divine having the answers within, and that the ideas presented here, must be realized at a grassroots level to change society: Gandhi's struggle for a free India is used as one example. Finally, if you like Hinduism, Western mystics such as Julian of Norwich and Teresa of Avila, if you are interested in reading some of the new directions coming forward (I believe) in feminism: this may be the book for you. And, if you are a father of a young daughter, you especially ought to read this book to be informed of what is happening to young girls in patriarchal cultures around the world.
Rating:
Summary: Totally engaging and scholarly!
Review: Flinders does an outstanding job of reviewing the history and tracing the links of spirituality and feminism that have long been overlooked. She has referenced a plethora of literature to support her ideas and includes some often forgotten and overlooked myths and stories of Goddesses. She outlines 4 stages, or themes relating to a women's spirituality in contrast to feminism, and provides examples of her personal experiences. In addition, she raises points about violence to women and children, and tries to answer the question of how to empower women. I highly recommend this book, for both men and women!
Rating: 
Summary: Essentialist assumptions and gross generalizations
Review: Flinders' book grated on my nerves from beginning to end. For one, when Flinders generalizes about "women" or "spirituality" she is blind to the fact that she is talking only of upper-middle class privliged white women like herself, who practice a form of meditation or mysticism. Also, she, like certain other feminist scholars, believes in a blissful pre-patriarchal society of goddess worship which was destroyed by the mean ole' Greeks and Hebrews. Any reputable historian could tell you that it just is not that simple. She plays up the Hebrews as mean and patriarchal and Jesus as the Ur-feminist man. Again, it is not that simple, and her assertion that it is is ignorant and offensive. The "feminist spirituality" charge of theacide against the Jews is antisemitic scapegoating in the manner of the medieval Church. Don't waste your money on this anti-intellectual piece of tripe. Browse the stacks here for 2 minutes and you could find something more inspiring and more fufilling spiritually.
Rating:
Summary: Essentialist assumptions and gross generalizations
Review: How can I cultivate Silence without remaining mute? How can I honor respect and love the other half of the human race in the face of what that half has "done" to my half? How can I nurture the interior of Spirit and still hold up my end of the tenuous presence we women have only recently gained in the larger world? As a woman who's found herself drained and badly in need of spiritual repair after a highly "successful" two decades in a "man's game" career, I came to this book hungry and thirsty in the extreme. Carol Flinder's sensitive, patient, beautifully intelligent and courageous exploration of the apparent conflict between women's need to be present and of equal value in the world and at the same time true to the needs of the feminine gives the peaceful rest of reconcilliation as well as the nourishment of understanding. I will read this one over and over. It's that meaningful.
Rating:
Summary: I will read this one over and over; it's that meaningful.
Review: How can I cultivate Silence without remaining mute? How can I honor respect and love the other half of the human race in the face of what that half has "done" to my half? How can I nurture the interior of Spirit and still hold up my end of the tenuous presence we women have only recently gained in the larger world? As a woman who's found herself drained and badly in need of spiritual repair after a highly "successful" two decades in a "man's game" career, I came to this book hungry and thirsty in the extreme. Carol Flinder's sensitive, patient, beautifully intelligent and courageous exploration of the apparent conflict between women's need to be present and of equal value in the world and at the same time true to the needs of the feminine gives the peaceful rest of reconcilliation as well as the nourishment of understanding. I will read this one over and over. It's that meaningful.
|
