Carol P. Christ is a religious scholar who lives in Greece and is the director of the Ariadne Institute for the Study of Myth and Ritual. "To nurture life is to manifest the power of the Goddess," she writes, "to honor, respect, and support mothers and children . . . to embody the intelligent love that is the ground of all being." These are some of the touchstones that enable us to make the mythos of the Goddess into an ethos, or way of life.

Growing numbers of women and men around the world, Christ observes, are tapping into the nourishing vitalities of the Goddess. Grounded in the body, the Earth, and nature, the Goddess balances the patriarchal, disembodied, dualistic, and transcendent image of the Divine common in Western religions. The rebirth of the Goddess in our time signals "a compelling image of female power, a vision of the deep connection of all beings in the web of life, and a call to create peace on earth."

Christ believes that the institutionalizing of warfare as a way of life led to the subjugation and subordination of women. Today many women are finding renewal through rituals celebrating the Goddess as a giver of life and showing reverence for the natural world. The thea-logy that Christ unspools here puts the accent on the spiritual practices of beauty, love, hospitality, connections, and nurturing. The author interweaves the personal and the scholarly into an exquisite tapestry of feminist spirituality.