ABSTRACT
The two most important and comprehensive feminist interventions in the philosophy of religion-Pamela Sue Anderson’s A Feminist Philosophy of Religion and Grace Jantzen’s Becoming Divine: Toward a Feminist Philosophy of Religion1-
follow the mainstream of analytic and continental philosophy of religion in focusing on belief.2 Anderson arguably remains closer to that tradition than does Jantzen. Rather than changing the aims of philosophy of religion, Anderson insists that gender must become a crucial analytic category within accounts of the process of justification. More centrally (and more audaciously), she argues that philosophical arguments grounded in feminist concerns must not only justify, but also evaluate belief and its constitution. Jantzen, on the other hand, eschews justification, arguing that feminist philosophy of religion has different aims than does its Anglo-American counter-part. For Jantzen, philosophy of religion is theological and practical; properly pursued, it will lead to the “becoming divine” of women rather than the justification of religious belief. Yet Jantzen too focuses her attention on “religious discourse and the symbolic of which it is a part.” The goal of feminist philosophy of religion is less to justify or to argue for the truth or falsity of belief than to “restructur[e] that myth in ways that foster human dignity —perhaps in ways that oblige and enable us to become divine” (Jantzen 1999: 22).3 Questions of justification thereby give place to questions of moral or political adequacy. Jantzen suggests the primacy of moral or political over epistemological justification, whereas in Anderson the two exist side by side.
