Daily Inspiration Quote by Carol P. Christ

Christ is doing something slyly disarming here: she borrows the language of admiration that typically polices religious boundaries, then uses it to expose how porous those boundaries already are. “Christian women” arrive as the presumed moral mainstream, the audience you’re supposed to take as culturally authoritative. Their “great respect” functions like a social permission slip, a way of saying: even insiders vouch for me. But Christ pivots immediately from their praise of her “bravery and courage” to the tell: the Isis earrings, the Nile River Goddess pendant. The sentence performs its own reveal.

The intent isn’t to dunk on Christians; it’s to complicate the neat story that pagan or goddess-centered spirituality sits outside respectable life. These women aren’t merely tolerant. They’re already participating in a diluted, aestheticized polytheism, the kind modern consumer culture makes easy: deities as jewelry, archetypes as accessories. Christ lets “perhaps even gesturing” do a lot of work. It suggests an almost sheepish confession, a nonverbal admission that their identities are layered and a little contradictory.

Subtext: her “work” has been framed as risky, even transgressive, because it challenges patriarchal religious norms. By pairing that framing with the casual presence of goddess iconography on Christian bodies, Christ implies the real threat isn’t foreign gods; it’s women claiming spiritual agency in public. The context is second-wave feminist theology and the Goddess movement, where “courage” often meant enduring ridicule from both religious institutions and secular academia. This line turns the gaze back: the culture that calls her brave is already wearing her argument.