Ritual Making Women looks at the way in which women's making of ritual has emerged from the rapidly developing field of women's spirituality and theology. The author uses ethnographic material to explore how the construction of ritual uses story-making and embodied action to empower women. Ritual, far from being a timeless and universal practice, is shown to be a contextual and gendered performance in which women subvert conventional distinctions of private and public. The book combines narrative and case study material and draws on feminist theology and theory, social anthropology and gender studies.

Reverence is a worldview: a way of approaching life with wonder, care, gratitude, and respect. Right now on earth, this lkind of attention is vital. The invitation to reverence, and all the suggestions in this book for anchoring meaning in daily life, is to walk in awareness, especially an awareness of our precious connections to each other and to the planet we are part of. Awareness makes us more conscious of our choices. This is the essence of spiritual ecology: the re-enchantment of our relationship to earth and each other as part of earth.Our awareness of all the things life brings: the tender, fierce, resilient, calm, despairing, joyous aspects of life? these are what we are here to experience. These are what incarnation is about. With reverence, we slow down and witness and feel and celebrate and make meaning, alone, and together with others. We make little spots of beauty. Pause before meals to drop into full appreciation. We say "thank you" to plants before harvesting them. We mark important moments in a new way. We rebind ourselves to the cycle of the day, the moon, the seasons. With attention, we might even more deeply connect to milestone events and life phases, such as coming of age or an empty nest or a reconciliation.Reverence offers ways to think about ritual and ceremony. The dozens of rituals, ceremonies and designed experiences feed the reader's own instinct and intuition about meaning-making, and inspire the reader to deeply drink in the beauty of life- in all of its daily joys, milestone celebrations and losses. Christine includes personal, partner and communal rituals for daily living, for thresholds, new beginnings, celebrations and losses.

Learn how to create a sacred space and use ritual for empowerment in everyday life, with this classic from Diane Stein.

Ritual Making Women looks at the way in which women's making of ritual has emerged from the rapidly developing field of women's spirituality and theology. The author uses ethnographic material to explore how the construction of ritual uses story-making and embodied action to empower women. Ritual, far from being a timeless and universal practice, is shown to be a contextual and gendered performance in which women subvert conventional distinctions of private and public. The book combines narrative and case study material and draws on feminist theology and theory, social anthropology and gender studies.

Women's Rites, Women's Mysteries is a practical and magickal, one-of-a-kind resource for creating and facilitating Goddess- and woman-centered rituals. Written for individuals and groups, both beginners and experienced ritualists alike, Dianic High Priestess and ritualist Ruth Barrett guides women through a clear, step-by-step process that teaches the components of effective ritual-making for any significant occasion, seasonal holiday, or life-cycle event. From developing the ritual's purpose and theme, to the incorporation of energetics, appropriate ritual structure, ritual facilitation, magickal techniques, creating invocations, evaluating the ritual experience, and an exploration of the priestess role in the Dianic tradition, Ruth provides the tools and inspiration for women to create transformation and bring more meaning to their lives through the art of ritual making.

More of Mason Currey's irresistible Daily Rituals, this time exploring the daily obstacles and rituals of women who are artists--painters, composers, sculptors, scientists, filmmakers, and performers. We see how these brilliant minds get to work, the choices they have to make: rebuffing convention, stealing (or secreting away) time from the pull of husbands, wives, children, obligations, in order to create their creations. From those who are the masters of their craft (Eudora Welty, Lynn Fontanne, Penelope Fitzgerald, Marie Curie) to those who were recognized in a burst of acclaim (Lorraine Hansberry, Zadie Smith) . . . from Clara Schumann and Shirley Jackson, carving out small amounts of time from family life, to Isadora Duncan and Agnes Martin, rejecting the demands of domesticity, Currey shows us the large and small (and abiding) choices these women made--and continue to make--for their art: Isak Dinesen, "I promised the Devil my soul, and in return he promised me that everything I was going to experience would be turned into tales," Dinesen subsisting on oysters and Champagne but also amphetamines, which gave her the overdrive she required . . . And the rituals (daily and otherwise) that guide these artists: Isabel Allende starting a new book only on January 8th . . . Hilary Mantel taking a shower to combat writers' block ("I am the cleanest person I know") . . . Tallulah Bankhead coping with her three phobias (hating to go to bed, hating to get up, and hating to be alone), which, could she "mute them," would make her life "as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water" . . . Lillian Hellman chain-smoking three packs of cigarettes and drinking twenty cups of coffee a day--and, after milking the cow and cleaning the barn, writing out of "elation, depression, hope" ("That is the exact order. Hope sets in toward nightfall. That's when you tell yourself that you're going to be better the next time, so help you God.") . . . Diane Arbus, doing what "gnaws at" her . . . Colette, locked in her writing room by her first husband, Henry Gauthier-Villars (nom de plume: Willy) and not being "let out" until completing her daily quota (she wrote five pages a day and threw away the fifth). Colette later said, "A prison is one of the best workshops" . . . Jessye Norman disdaining routines or rituals of any kind, seeing them as "a crutch" . . . and Octavia Butler writing every day no matter what ("screw inspiration"). Germaine de Staël . . . Elizabeth Barrett Browning . . . George Eliot . . . Edith Wharton . . . Virginia Woolf . . . Edna Ferber . . . Doris Lessing . . . Pina Bausch . . . Frida Kahlo . . . Marguerite Duras . . . Helen Frankenthaler . . . Patti Smith, and 131 more--on their daily routines, superstitions, fears, eating (and drinking) habits, and other finely (and not so finely) calibrated rituals that help summon up willpower and self-discipline, keeping themselves afloat with optimism and fight, as they create (and avoid creating) their creations.

Womanhood in the Making is an ethnographic study of Brahman women's ritual practice that focuses on relations between religious practice, class and caste inequalities, and nationalist discourses. Using analyses of both domestic ritual and women's personal narratives, the author investigates the spaces of female agency that ritual practice affords,

Wising Up provides rituals and guidance for women as they age. It helps them make the often difficult life transitions wisely and in the context of their faith communities. Instead of focusing exclusively on time-worn thresholds such as menopause, marriage and divorce, and dying, the book contains affirming rituals on: coming to terms with the changes in one's body; learning to live with and depend on an item like a walker or a hearing aid; giving up one's driver's license; deciding how to give away one's household contents; and being orphaned. In addition to the rituals--and guidelines on how to create one's own rituals--the book contains a number of short stories, hymns, prayers, quotations, and poems to help ease women through the aging process. Contributors: Susan Beehler, Teresa Berger, Kathy Black, Ruth Duck, Heather Murray Elkins, Brigitte Enzner-Probst, Martha Whitmore Hickman, Martha Ann Kirk, Mary Elizabeth Mullino Moore, Susan Roll, Deborah Sokolove, Linda J. Vogel, and Janet Walton.