Sacred Voices: Essential Women's Wisdom Through the Ages

Moving chronologically through millennia of women's history from the earliest times to the present, this unique collection contains writings from over 173 of the world's women sages and saints.

Containing poetry, prayers, chants, meditations, and contemplative prose from all great religious traditions, this treasure trove gathers together for the first time the best of women's spiritual wisdom.

Women's spiritual experience has been suppressed through much of modern history and is only now been recovered in its full richness. This anthology contains writings from hundreds of women from the past five millennia and a wide range of cultures. The collection encompasses all areas of women's sacred experience from the most radically mystical encounters with the divine-including visions, locutions, and auditions-to simply daily awareness of the holy in all things.

Publishers Weekly

Ford-Grabowsky (Prayers for All People) has produced a rich anthology of spiritual writing by women. The product of the editor's decades-long journey into feminist spirituality, this collection is distinguished by its dizzying breadth. It includes both medieval mystics, such as Julian of Norwich, and contemporary memoirists, like Kathleen Norris. Christians, like nun Joan Chittister, are side-by-side with Vodou practitioners (Karen McCarthy Brown) and pagans (Starhawk). Ford-Grabowsky has even made sure to include many different genres: poetry, like Emily Dickinson's "I Had Been Hungry All the Years," complements excerpts from novels by Amy Tan and Virginia Woolf. She is to be commended for her choice of distinguished translations: poet Jane Kenyon translates Anna Akhmatova, and Langston Hughes eloquently renders Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral's "Prayer." One only wishes for a few more conservative voices. Jewish renewal rabbi Tirzah Firestone is here, but where is Orthodox Jewish Torah teacher Avivah Zornberg? Mainline Protestant (and scholar of Hinduism) Diana Eck writes an essay called "Encountering God in Other Traditions," but where is Frederica Mathewes-Green on her conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy or Ruth Bell Graham on evangelism? Ford-Grabowsky has provided concise, informative and lively biographical sketches of each contributor, and she concludes the book with a useful guide to further reading. This lovely collection will make an excellent gift, an inspiring bedside companion or a handy resource for preachers, writers and spiritual dreamers. (Mar.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.