ABSTRACT
This book describes a theology of touch, and it comes out of my own experience of healing. It is a different book than I might have written had I come into adulthood in the 1970s rather than in the late 1990s. My mentors in the Pagan community, many of them women of my mother’s
generation, have spoken to me of being raised with a pervasive body shame that their rituals and books sought to heal. The feminist movement has not eradicated body-hatred from our culture, but it has undoubtedly had its successes. I was one of a generation of young women who grew up reading feminist, body-positive books like Our Bodies, Ourselves, and, despite my parents’ conservative religious upbringing, they taught me that sexuality was a holy thing and did not condemn me when I made choices different from theirs. Today, when I speak to women younger than myself about classic 1970s and 1980s texts of feminist spirituality, some find it difficult to relate to them: the feelings of shame, powerlessness, and rage expressed in those texts are alien to their experience. Though the problems addressed by second-wave feminism have not disappeared, a shift has occurred. For some young people, learning to recognize the holiness of the body no longer begins from a place of trauma.
