| Charlene Spretnak was
born in Pittsburgh and raised in Columbus,
Ohio. She holds a B.A. magna cum laude,
with appointment to Phi Beta Kappa, from
St. Louis University (Jesuit) and an M.A.
in English and American literature from
the University of California at Berkeley.
Her work is internationally recognized in
the areas of spirituality, cultural history,
feminist and other social criticism, and
ecological thought (Green politics, ecofeminism,
ecophilosophy). She is one of the founding
mothers of the Women’s Spirituality,
through her work in the second half of the
1970s and early 1980s.
In 1978 her first book, Lost Goddesses
of Early Greece: A Collection of Pre-Hellenic
Myths (Beacon Press) reconstructs the
pre-Olympian myths for the first time in
more than 2500 years. Walter Burkert, the
distinguished Swiss scholar of early religion
in Europe, called it “most impressive,”
and the Los Angeles Times called
it “a poetic revelation.”
In 1982 Prof. Spretnak proposed a framework
with which to understand the emergent Women’s
Spirituality movement: an anthology she
edited titled The Politics of Women’s
Spirituality (Anchor Books / Doubleday).
It is arranged in three sections -- the
first on recovering the history of women’s
spirituality, the second on personal spiritual
growth, and the third on political activism
informed by spiritual practice. For the
1994 edition, she added an essay on the
first twenty years of the Women’s
Spirituality movement.
In 1991 she wrote States of Grace:
The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern
Age (HarperSanFrancisco), which is
an interpretation of four of the great spiritual
traditions and their relevance to solving
the crises of modernity. The traditions
explored are Buddhism, Native American spiritualities,
the contemporary rebirth of Goddess spirituality,
and the Abrahamic cluster (Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam). The Boston Globe praised
the book for Spretnak’s “rare
gift for making a bridge from scholarship
to ‘the real world.’”
Prof. Spretnak has also written three books
on ecological politics and ecophilosophy.
She is co-author of Green Politics:
The Global Promise (Dutton, 1984),
which was a catalyst for the forming of
the Green Party movement in this country,
of which she was a co-founder. In 1986 her
lecture to the annual meeting of the E.
F. Schumacher Society of America was published
as The Spiritual Dimension of Green
Politics (Bear & Co.). Her book,
The Resurgence of the Real: Body, Nature,
and Place in a Hypermodern World (Addison-Wesley,
1997; Routledge, 1999), was named one of
the Best Books of the Year by the Los
Angeles Times. Of that book Publishers
Weekly wrote, “In her far-ranging,
in-depth study of the structure of contemporary
alienation, Spretnak joins the ranks of
gifted writers qua intellectual social analysts
like Lewis Mumford.”
In her most recent book, Missing Mary:
The Queen of Heaven and Her Re-Emergence
in the Modern Church (Palgrave-Macmillan,
2004), Prof. Spretnak challenges the radical
reduction of the status and meaning of the
Virgin Mary in the “modernized”
Roman Catholic Church over the past forty
years, which has largely denied her symbolic,
cosmological, and mystical dimensions. Illuminating
several dynamics in the interface of religion
and modernity, Prof. Spretnak both interprets
and advances the case for the current grassroots
resurgence of Marian spirituality in its
fullness.
In 1989 Charlene Spretnak was inducted
into the Ohio Women’s Hall of Fame
in recognition of her writings on spirituality
and social justice. She is a professor in
the Women’s Spirituality branch of
the Philosophy and Religion Department at
the California Institute of Integral Studies,
a graduate institute in San Francisco. She
is currently working on a book about the
spiritual dimension of modern and contemporary
art, as well as a Green book about the ways
in which eco-social solutions are moving
successfully into the mainstream.
Read an interview
with Charlene Spretnak discussing The
Resurgence of the Real.
Read "Embracing the Body," a
chapter excerpted from States of Grace:
The Recovery of Meaning in the Postmodern
Age.
Excerpt:
Part I
Excerpt:
Part II
Read more about Missing
Mary: The Queen of Heaven and Her Re-Emergence
in the Modern Church.
For further information about her books, visit www.CharleneSpretnak.com
Women's
Spirituality Program |
