This book made me start doing what I might have once referred to as "hippie shit." Recently I was at a picnic that was being held at dusk at the lake, and I wondered away from the crowd and offered up a blessing to the Goddess. I blame/thank Sue Monk Kidd for this. Got to be unafraid to seek the divine in a way that fits and feels right.

On the day my daughter started Kindergarten, I had my first meeting with my spiritual director, which is mid-sabbatical for me. At the end of our meeting, she recommended this book and I drove directly to the Fuller bookstore and bought and sat in the cafe and read the prologue. And then I cried the whole drive home. This book will mess with you, especially if you are a woman who leads in the evangelical church. Read with care! I found this book to be the door into profound personal journey of f...

I'd like to rate this higher, because I think the topic is an important one, and the author really tries to make it accessible by telling her own story, but I had a hard time with a lot of it, and not because of the subject matter itself, but because of the way it was presented. In the introduction, Kidd says that every person who undertakes a journey to seek out the feminine divine will have her or his own unique experience, and that she only aims to tell her own individual story; but throughou...

My friend lent me this book for a day and I started to read it. I was amazed after only a few pages. The woman sounded like me. Like ME! So many of the thoughts and ideas she was presenting were familiar, even in the way she articulated them. When my friend returned to collect her book the next day, I went to Barnes and Noble and bought it. I finished reading it several days later with lots of marked up bits in the margins. It was like water on parched ground to read the true journey of a woman

This book chronicles Sue Monk Kidd's journey from a Southern Baptist church to a spirituality focused on what she calls The Feminine Divine. She leaves Orthodox Christianity after coming face to face with the sexism in the church and, as she sees it, in the whole Christian religion. Kidd articulates a lot of feelings and questions I myself have had as I have explored what it means to be a woman in the Church. I do not think I come to the same conclusions she does or that I will follow in her pat...

The following is what I wrote for the book club that had me reading The Dance of the Dissident Daughter. Beneath it, also in italics is an added paragraph.. I did finish the book but it was a hard slog to do it. I'd read a paragraph and by the end of it couldn't recall exactly what the first part of the paragraph was. I couldn't stop thinking how nice it was for her to be able to take all those trips, not only the more local retreats to her circle of trees but all over the country and abroad. I

I've had this book on my shelf for quite a while and never felt ready to read it until now. Somehow the idea of a "sacred Feminine" and "Goddess" language felt really outside of my comfort zone, knocking against my traditional, conservative upbringing. I worried that it would be too theologically "out there" for me to relate to, but I bought it anyway because I have loved another book of Kidd's, When the Heart Waits, so much.Although my own journey has been different than Kidd's, I found so many...

This memoir set me on a course of searching out more books about feminism and religion. I really liked the way Kidd lets the reader into her inner world and describes her journey, but does not become too theoretical or abstract. She keeps it real by writing about concrete experiences with specific details.

Part memoir, part feminist semi-Christian theology, this book is author Sue Monk Kidd's narrative of her personal struggle with rampant sexism in her longtime Christian faith, sprinkled with a hefty dose of psychoanalysis. I really enjoyed the personal narrative aspect of the book, and applaud Kidd for her bravery in speaking out against patriarchal oppression of women of faith. That said, the book was disappointing to me on several fronts. It relies heavily on a handful of scholarly resources.

I remember the first time I didn't feel equal in a church. It may have been implicitly there all my life but the real in your face awakening happened when I went to a bible study in my early adult years. It was a "biblical truths" series contrasting what the bible says vs what the world says. The leader showed a clip of Carl's COSMOS series where he is saying something like " We are all made of star stuff, evolved over years...ect"The leader stops the movie and says "Now I doubt any of you belie...

Rarely do I not finish a book, but after reading (okay, reading may not be the exact word for what I did - "plowing through" would be more accurate) over three quarters of it, I finally put the book down for good. I really wanted to add this one to my shelf of feminist essays, memoirs and non-fiction that I love because the subject is important, but this one just didn’t speak to me and here is why:This is Monk Kidd’s telling of her feminist spiritual awakening (so far so good) and how she had to...

This book rocked my little world in 2004. Sue Monk Kidd had been my "spiritual mentor" for a number of years. We were both Southern Baptist, and deeply spiritual. She was a SB minister's wife; I was a SB minister's daughter. I could count on her books to "make my heart burn" with love for God. I had already entered a time of transformation--so much so that I had entered the Catholic Church two years before I read this book for the first time. But this book shattered my idealistic, still-remainin...

An emotional and thought provoking read for any woman raised in a partiarchal religious tradition. I'm not Baptist, I was raised Mormon, but could relate to everything she was saying. She nails it. And then she explains how she learned to heal, and how she found her own form of spirituality that didn't wound her femininity. Probably one of the most powerful books I've read for me personally. Admittedly, the second half of the book gets a bit woo-woo, but that to me is not the important part. The...

author writes about her transformation from good patriarchal daughter to embracing the feminine soul/spirit, kinda long winded but last section practical, explaining in her implementation of her new outlook. she was southern Baptist and mainstream Christian magazine writer, but quit all that.