The Dance of Aurora

This chapter suggests that embodied ritual practices of the feminine—involving media, art, psycho-spiritual technologies, and techniques of the occult—manifest transmedial auric fields that weave the dance of Aurora, the dance of awakening of the Goddess of Light. These fields resonate with the universal heart vibe, channeling the healing energies of the cosmic Mother to the physical, the digital, the mental, and the tech-noetic. Specific examples from the work of three women are presented, namely Dr. Lila Moore, Vedava (the author of this chapter) and Sedona Soulfire. These modern creatrixes actualize their media priestess function by fusing consciousness and the imaginative with the ancient and the futuristic, in the convergence of art, body, technology, and 21st century feminine spirituality.

Mamas on Mission: Retracing the Church through the Spiritual Life Writing of Single Female Evangelical Missionaries

This article plumbs the spiritual life writing of two twentieth-century single female evangelical missionaries, Lillian Trasher and Dr. Helen Roseveare, for evidence of the church. It rests on concepts of feminine spirituality and the history of women and mission. The historical analysis traces the women’s lives from their early formation through their mission work and looks at six themes of the church on mission that emerged from their writing. It argues that they served as mamas of the church in their contexts by nurturing life through their acts of compassionate care. Their small but deliberate acts of sacrifice and service continue to pose missiological invitations and challenges to the church. Therefore, the article also builds an initial “mama theology” of the church on mission by examining where images in Isaiah and impulses in mission today intersect with the themes in the women’s writing.

Radical Grace: Hymning of ‘Womanhood’ in Therigatha

Focusing primarily on Therigatha,1 the poems by the first Buddhist women, and correlating them with the compositions of non-Buddhist women mystics like Meerabai, Lal Ded, Muktabai, Janabai and Akka Mahadevi, this article is a study of spirituality, femininity and poetic expressions in a comparative mode. The article aims to address two major issues: First, it attempts to understand how the women mystics asserted their authority as the conveyers of divine message in a society which was essentially patriarchal and suspicious about the credentials of feminine utterances. Second, the article seeks to delineate a certain womanizing of saintliness through the invoking of domesticity (role as wife and mother) and the use of metaphors related to the female body and desire by these select women mystics as the denouement of a radical stance of an ascetic ‘feminine spirituality’, aimed at discovering transcendence even by retaining the conscious deploying of the components, often viewed as mundane.

Before ṣūfiyyāt

Some scholars have attempted to identify a distinctive, feminine spirituality among early Muslim renunciants and Sufis. Studies by Roded, Azad, Dakake, and Silvers are reviewed. Content analysis of Ibn al-Jawzī, Ṣifat al-ṣafwa, suggests that renunciant women and men (of the period before classical Sufism) were remembered for similar devotional activities in similar frequencies. The Damascene Yazīd b. Maysara (fl. earlier 2nd/8th cent.) is quoted as saying, “A reprobate woman is like a thousand reprobate men, while a virtuous woman will be credited with the work of a hundred male saints.” There is no room here to say that collections of renunciant sayings name surprisingly many saintly women, or that the tradition systematically suppressed reports of saintly women from disbelief in female saintliness. On the contrary, saintly women were part of the prevailing ideology.