Twelfth International Conference on Religion & Spirituality in Society

Abstract

The study describes a transdisciplinary, personal, and academic inquiry into Goddess Spirituality in contemporary society. It focuses on the stories of women who joined a Goddess Temple in the Appalachian Mountains of Western North Carolina. The central inquiry regards the motivations and lived experiences of women who are drawn to Goddess Spirituality and who choose to join a Goddess Temple. Organic inquiry and narrative inquiry was employed to collect the stories of these women, and the women’s narratives, or tellings, have been analyzed using The Listening Guide (Gilligan, C. & et al., 2006). Analysis of the study’s results continues and initial findings have been that while the women’s stories and motivations share broad common themes, the individual women’s stories are much more nuanced as demonstrated by the construction of “I Poems.”