There are a few good essays here: Pamela Sue Anderson, Roberta Quance, Kitty S. Datta and Philip Leonard emerge with some credit. The rest are too often like early postgraduate scratchings: ‘I’ve just discovered the writings of x and I want to apply it to y’. We should be warned when the introductory essay by Heather Walton includes an example of this: ‘Levinas is Jewish and his work is an extended reflection upon the rise of fascism and its legacy … These images of encounter with an alien God stand in stark contrast to the continuum between God, man and brother imagined in liberal religious thinking’ (12–13). All this for the liberal to applaud, just what they would object to if it had been said by Karl Barth or Billy Graham.

Walton may be correct to claim that sexual difference is the defining concern of our age (following Luce Irigaray), but the idea that bodies are texts, and vice-versa, since there is no word/matter distinction still seems, to this reviewer, a good example of nonsense on stilts. There is a particularly poor essay on W.H. Auden. The last line of the poem and the article read: ‘we are never alone since our fractured selves, when we turn and face them, give us away’ (42). Or, to say Adieu is to bring God in: ‘We must say goodbye, adieu, to the paradisal states of our being in order truly to preserve our Being, for paradise cannot hold’. Likewise, in other essays, there is a lot about the Other, and even how that magic word can be found in ‘(M)other’ and ‘(Br)other’!

The essay on ‘HD’ by Quance is thought-provoking and gets us to the nub of at least one matter, that of the felt-need by some, perhaps many women to envisage God as female: ‘According to Luce Irigaray, the idea of a goddess—of god in a female image—is essential for women, if they are to possess an image of their perfected subjectivity … The self is both pearl and mother of pearl’ (96). With reference to the last, concluding sentence, much Feminist theology in this vein may be rightly viewed as footnotes to Feuerbach (whose very thesis is in fact mentioned on p. 156).

Datta’s essay gives an Irigarayan analysis in which she claims that religious women’s silence is not suppression (pace Julia Kristeva whose study of mysticism was, allegedly, limited to Mme de Guyon) but which can be subversive of talkative theology. The Irigarayan loses her self in the tide of otherness, whereas Kristeva is still interested in building up the self through relation to the Other (for which Anderson criticises her in her useful essay on the Bulgarian). Leonard’s essay describes how Irigaray has moved from a Levinasian ethics of difference to one of sexual difference and an eroticised mysticism, embracing eros, rather than denying that it matters ultimately. For Irigarayan feminism, Gender is an (the?) ultimate reality, whereas for Levinas (and Derrida) it was the obvious, the visibly symbolic of otherness in general.

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