Extracts from JOURNEYS BY HEART, Crossroad, New York.

Sin is not something to be punished, but something to be healed.

The pervasive, profoundly patriarchal elements of Christianity have forced those of us who consider ourselves feminist and Christian to struggle intensely with our faith and our commitments to justice and wholeness.

Making masculinity normative places Christian theology directly in the path of the feminist assault on androcentrism, an ideology which defines as true of all human persons what is true of men.

In upholding as normative the patriarchal family and its structures, Christianity has ignored the suffering of women and children at its very center and has not understood the implications of patriarchy for those who live within such structures.

No assessment of the human character can ignore, without great peril, feminist analyses of male dominance.

… anger is a way to intimacy and loving, if it is understood to contain clues to our own pain.

Buried anger is closely tied to the body because the body is the home of the heart. Bodies are our first, closest, and most powerful connection to both ourselves and all else.

… Christ is a major problem in feminist theology. That problem has been born of an unholy trinity, father-son-ghost, that has cradled Christ in its patriarchal arms.

Traditional Christian theology has made self-sacrifice the highest form of love. In affirming God/dess as love, I am proposing that we see intimacy as love in its fullest form.

The defiance of male dominance in feminism means a woman’s right to determine the destiny of her own body and its health and the healing of the whole person.