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Welcome! The Women and Religion Movement is alive and well in the 21st Century. A grassroots project started by lay leaders in the 1970s as an effort to promote examination of religious roots of sexism and patriarchy within the UUA and beyond, UU Women and Religion officially began as a task force following the unanimously-passed WOMEN AND RELIGION RESOLUTION at the 1977 UUA General Assembly. Although the Task Force was eventually sunsetted, the movement still exists in UU communities that hold Women & Religion programs and gatherings for those who identify as women. It exists at the UU General Assembly, where UUW&R brings our Store to the Exhibit Hall and occasionally hosts a gathering. And it lives in the hearts and lives of people who have been touched by the many changes inspired by this movement.

"We do not want a piece of the pie. It is still a patriarchal pie. We want to change the recipe!" -- Rosemary Matson

Charlene Spretnak Honored for Leadership in Women's Spirituality

Charlene SpretnakCharlene Spretnak is the 2012 winner of the Demeter Award for Leadership in Women’s Spirituality. The award will be presented at the Association for the Study of Women and Mythology (ASWM) national conference in San Francisco, May 11-12, 2012. Her presentation is entitled, Modernity, Mythology, and the Elusive Gestalt.

Ms. Spretnak’s work is internationally recognized in the areas of spirituality, cultural history, feminist and other social criticism, and ecological thought (Green politics, ecofeminism, ecophilosophy). In 2006 she was named one of “100 Eco-Heroes of All Time” by the publication of the British government’s Environmental Department.
She is one of the founding mothers of the Women’s Spirituality movement, through her work in the second half of the 1970s and the early 1980s.  Her first book, Lost Goddesses of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic Myths reconstructed pre-Olympian myths for the first time in more than 2500 years; the Los Angeles Times called it “a poetic revelation.” [Two pieces from this work and several other references are included in Shirley Ranck's Cakes for the Queen of Heaven curriculum - Gretchen]

Her most recent book, Relational Reality: New Discoveries of Interrelatedness That Are Transforming the Modern World (2011), focuses on the “Relational Shift” seen in the fields of Education and Parenting, Health and Healthcare, Community Design and Architecture, and the Economy.

States of Grace: The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern Age is her exploration of four of the great spiritual traditions and their relevance to solving the crises of modernity. The traditions explored are Buddhism, Native American spiritualities, the contemporary rebirth of Goddess spirituality, and the Abrahamic cluster of religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam).

In Missing Mary: The Queen of Heaven and Her Re-Emergence in the Modern Church (2004), Ms. Spretnak challenges the radical reduction of the status and meaning of the Virgin Mary in the “modernized” Roman Catholic Church over the past forty years, which has largely denied her symbolic, cosmological, and mystical dimensions.

She is currently working on a book on the spiritual dimensions of modern and contemporary art. She is professor emerita in the Women’s Spirituality program of the Philosophy and Religion department at the California Institute of Integral Studies.

For more information see her web site.

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