Bare Your Soul (The Thinking Girl's Guide to Enlightenment)

Whether raised within a specific belief system or warned against all things religious, young women today have been left with questions that dating guides and pop feminist theory cannot answer. This collection answers the call—a handbook for the soul that offers the wisdom and validation of how a variety of women negotiate an empowering spiritual existence in a pop-culture world. In Bare Your Soul, women of all backgrounds and traditions share how investigating questions of spirituality affects their lives and their identities. It is a provocative look at the ways in which young women of today both celebrate and repudiate religion—and, ultimately, find answers that fit. One woman shares her practice as a Shiite Muslim and how it intersects and collides with her personal relationships. A woman raised within the Black Baptist community finally finds a spiritual connection with the Unitarian Church—then struggles to balance spiritual fulfillment with her desire to see other Black faces in her place of worship. A young mother speaks to the challenges brought on when play dates bring together her family’s religion—feminist Goddess-worship—and that of her children’s fundamentalist Christian friends. A Western feminist who has converted to Buddhism attempts to reconcile her gender identity with a philosophy that renders gender irrelevant, and one woman argues that the Church of Consumerism is all she needs. A compelling, much-needed anthology, this collection offers balanced, insiders’ information on a wide spectrum of traditions and practices, allowing readers to make informed, intelligent spiritual choices for themselves.