Using ideas from biblical criticism, psychoanalysis, feminist and liberation theology, the essay reflects on naming a God free of caste and gender.

Spiritual reflections on close friendships with battered women.

This interesting and instructive pamphlet addresses the issue of violent and oppressive religious imagery in the Bible. The Bible is one important source of our culture, written from a context of a hierarchical, oppressive, and violent culture. It has shaped our views of the proper relationship between male and female, ruler and ruled, divine and human. Its effect has been ambivalent, both putting out and feeding the fires of violence and oppression. This pamphlet traces Biblical imagery of a violent Sacred Marriage, with God as a dominant and possessive male and his people as the subordinate female whom He must punish. She notes the contrast of the egalitarian Sacred Marriage in the Song of Songs with this. She addresses practical aspects of rooting out oppressive and hierarchical religious language. ( )