shall see, many of the same feminist interests and bibliographical sources as Jantzen, she
nonetheless sketches a more hopeful path of possible interchange between the disciplines
than Jantzen is able to envisage. To Anderson's alternative proposals we shall now turn,
before moving to our own final assessments and positive suggestions.
Anderson's Vision of Feminist Philosophy of Religion
It may be most illuminating in this context to discuss Anderson's work in contrapuntal
relation to Jantzen's by drawing out the chief contrasts between their ideas. For in many
respects, their books witness to the same interests and concerns, and these can be quite
briefly mentioned at the outset, without requiring lengthy repetition. All these central
themes are already laid out in the first chapter of Anderson's A Feminist Philosophy of
Religion (1998, 3–27).
Like Jantzen, Anderson draws deeply, first, on the resources of contemporary continental
philosophy, especially on the insights of the post-Lacanian French feminists Luce
Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Likewise, “desire” is also a key category for Anderson, and a
theme that she sees largely repressed in current analytic philosophy of religion. Like
Jantzen, she traces that repression to a latent mind-body split in the thought of many in
the guild, as well as to an unacknowledged epistemological normativity given to the male
self (as falsely “male-neutral,” in her terms), and to an accompanying modeling of “God”
on the same idolatrous male self. Like Jantzen, Anderson is particularly scathing of the
discipline's classic investment in empirical and probabilistic demonstrations of God's
existence—a Lockean endeavor which Anderson takes in any case to be defunct since
Kant's first Critique, but especially tinged with “masculinist” repression of feminist
interests. Why she makes this charge of empiricism, in particular, we shall have reason to
probe and query later. She is scathing, too, of the metaphysical “realism” that commonly
accompanies such an endeavor, since she assumes (again summoning Nagel),^11 that such
claims can arise only from blinkered male attempts at epistemological privilege. A moral
disgust, similar to Jantzen's, with the way that the problem of evil has been discussed in
the discipline again appears in Anderson's book, though here with more attention to
distinctive recent contributions by female analytic scholars.^12 The Foucauldian question
of whose interests are served by the discourses of analytic philosophy of religion attends
Anderson's whole exercise, as it does Jantzen's, and the commitment to reconceive the
divine, and along with it the entire enterprise of philosophy of religion, drives the whole
project. The goal of this undertaking, finally, again as in Jantzen, is to allow women, and
themes stereotypically associated with them (desire, birth, death, excess, the unconscious,
any despised or subordinated “other”), to be fully accommodated into the discussion.
Such central commonalities of theme justify, I believe, my earlier contention that
Anderson and Jantzen at least start with a shared set of concerns, interests, and
bibliographical influences. But the way Anderson's analysis and proposals then develop
are markedly different from Jantzen's, for reasons that we shall now explore.^13
Probably the most decisive difference between the two women's projects arises in the
area of their fundamental epistemological commitments. Early on in her book (1998, 42–
47, and ch. 2) Anderson helpfully spells out three broad epistemological options that