Daily Inspiration Quote by Carol P. Christ

It’s a provocation disguised as a mandate: not only must “new humanity” be imagined differently, it must be spoken into being by women, and it must begin where Western thought has long been most anxious - the border between spirit and body. Carol P. Christ, writing from feminist theology and women’s studies, is pushing against a tradition that treated the body as a problem to be disciplined and the spirit as the “real” self that earns legitimacy. That split has never been abstract. It has structured whose experiences count as knowledge, whose desires are “pure,” and whose labor is considered merely biological or domestic.

“Spokesmen” is a deliberately charged word. Used for women, it both borrows institutional authority and exposes how routinely public moral speech has been coded male. Christ isn’t asking women to join an old conversation; she’s insisting they change the terms of human identity itself. The subtext is political as much as spiritual: when a culture associates men with mind and transcendence and women with flesh and immanence, women become the repository for everything a society wants to deny about dependence, vulnerability, and sexuality. Reconciliation, then, isn’t personal wellness rhetoric; it’s a reordering of power.

The “new humanity” language carries 20th-century liberation movements in its wake - second-wave feminism, ecological consciousness, post-Vatican II religious ferment. Christ’s intent is to frame feminist authority as world-making: if the sacred can include bodies, then bodies - especially those historically policed and shamed - become sites of meaning, ethics, and renewal.