Revisiting BISFT Summer School 1998, The College of St Mark and St John Plymouth, ‘Women Facing the Boundaries of Difference’

In her paper Expelled Again from Eden: Facing Difference through Connection, delivered in Plymouth in 1998, Mary Grey said the story of the Garden of Eden was a dilemma for Feminist Theologians. This because it both bears responsibility for the Fall of relationship between God and Man and the misogyny that has ensued through the ages but also underpinning the desire to return to a supposed golden age of matriarchy with the re-emergence of the Goddess and a related ecological and egalitarian epoch of harmony. Grey makes a connection between the Lost Garden myth and the second wave feminist ideal of global sisterhood of the 1960s. Reflecting on her paper and updating it later, Grey concluded she still felt the challenge of years ago: the sense of rightness of connection and mutuality, yet the crucial need to embrace difference.