ABSTRACT
Generally, it can be said that Goddess Spirituality is rooted in the quest to counteract the negative effects of patriarchal religions-especially Christianity and Judaism-by replacing the religious symbol system centered on a male God with one grounded in female images of divinity. Similarly, CGS centers on female images of the divine as an antidote to the dominant patriarchal ethos of Christianity. In CGS, in distinction to non-Christian expressions of Goddess Spirituality, the Christian tradition is mined for traces of the female divine-including Goddess fi gures-and often supplemented by elements from the emergent Goddess tradition. In this chapter, I will trace the interconnected origins of Goddess Spirituality, feminist theology, and CGS, with reference to Jone Salomonsen’s controversial argument that Goddess Spirituality, like feminist theology, is an expression of the “Protestant Principle,” and show that the trend toward CGS began with the emergence of the feminist study of religion, including feminist theology, in the early 1970s.
