Reading for Difference

Abstract

I remember meeting Ann very clearly. I had travelled the 40 or so miles by bus, and was gently welcomed into her neatly kept terraced home. In the back room, lined with her precious books, we sat and chatted over cups of tea. Ann is in her mid-seventies, once married, but now divorced and in a same-sex partnership; she had once been a lay Methodist preacher and heavily involved in the church. Her religious and spiritual life has altered since coming to feminism in the 1960s and 1970s and reading feminist theology, and she now attends Quaker meetings and affiliates to the Sea of Faith. As she understands it, the traditional concepts and teachings of Christianity hold very little water. While popular and academic theologians are part of her library, she is most likely to read and write poetry to glimpse the transcendent. In addition to employing strategies to filter for a biblically based “reader-centered canon-in-canon,” the women in this study are extending their spiritual reading practices to texts outside the boundaries of the Christian scriptures. As feminist theology’s turn to literature implies, Christian and post-Christian women are incorporating prose, poetry, fiction, and nonfiction into their spiritual reading practices.

Why is literature more important than theology?… the important reading has been literary … great writers reach the soul—whatever it is—theology reaches my intellect. But it takes the poets and the great prose writers to, I don’t know, to get to the whole person.

(Ann, Quaker)