Daily Inspiration Quote by Carol P. Christ

That opening shrug is doing more work than it admits. “At first” is a tiny hinge word, signaling conversion without preaching it: a mind that will change, a story that will move from indifference to attention. Carol P. Christ, writing as an educator and feminist theologian, uses the plainest possible sentence to smuggle in a larger critique of how we’re trained to look. If ancient Goddess images “did not interest” her, it’s not because they lack meaning; it’s because the meaning has been culturally misfiled as quaint, decorative, or academically marginal.

The subtext is about discipline as much as devotion. Western education often teaches “serious” history through male-centered canons, so the feminine divine arrives already framed as folklore or aberration. Christ’s understated confession mirrors a reader’s likely skepticism, lowering defenses. It’s a rhetorical move with pedagogical instincts: start where the student actually is (bored, doubtful), then expose the scaffolding that produced that boredom.

Context matters: Christ became a major voice in feminist spirituality in the 1970s and after, when scholars and activists were contesting the erasure of women’s symbols, bodies, and authority from religious narratives. By beginning with disinterest, she sidesteps the caricature of the zealot. The line implies that fascination with Goddess imagery isn’t an innate temperament; it’s a recovered capacity. Interest becomes political: a decision to treat what patriarchy calls “minor” as a serious archive of human longing, power, and belonging.