God/dess as the Transcendently Immanent Source of Life: On the Ecofeminist Thea/logy and Spirituality of Rosemary Radford Ruether
Abstract
In the following paper on the ecofeminist dimension of the considerable work of the feminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether, I will limit myself to questions and themes that are not purely theological, but which at the same time resonate with the themes and questions addressed in contemporary (eco)feminist philosophy, which revolve around issues of structural inequality and structural or systemic violence on the one hand, and the interdependence of lives, precariousness, and vulnerability on the other. Of the classic questions of systematic theology, two seem to me particularly relevant in this regard, namely the question of structural sin and the very understanding of who God/dess is.
Structural sin is the subject of the first part of this paper. God/dess in an ecofeminist perspective is the subject of the second part.
The third part focuses on theological ethics and specifically on the articulation between the ethics of the 'preferential option for the poor', based on liberation theology, and the ethics of ecological sustainability. Finally, I devote the fourth and final section to examples of the concrete everyday spiritual practices of lived Christian ecofeminist spirituality.