AND REDDER (via Robert Schwartz):

Revered as a feminist icon, then slated for being an intellectual lightweight, Naomi Wolf has experienced highs as well as lows … and then she met Jesus (Torcuil Crichton, 1/22/06, Sunday Herald)

Maybe it is an echo of Greer’s withering voice that spurs Wolf to open up for the first time in public about her spiritual awakening. Perhaps it is being asked once too often about the hitherto unexplained “mid-life crisis” that caused her to go off, in her early 40s, into the woods of upstate New York to write her latest book, The Treehouse. This self-help meditation on her father’s wisdom has drawn accusations that the author is embracing what she used to refer to as “patriarchy”.

Or it could have been the conversation about her divorce, during which she stared into the middle distance and seemed to be on the verge of tears . Whatever the reason , the trigger is a simple question about whether all the criticism and bitchiness has hurt her. She pauses then reveals something astonishing: her encounter with Jesus.

Naomi Wolf’s utterances on everything, from childbirth to Al Gore’s demeanour , have a disproportionate effect on public opinion. This latest confessional, a self-acknowledged “bombshell”, will make a generation of feminists cringe, while for her detractors, it will be the icing on the cake, plunging her into fresh controversy over her beliefs and her integrity as a feminist. Wolf’s very soul is about to become a theological battleground, and she knows it.

“ I am not going to be in the closet about this any more. I’m on a spiritual path, I answer to a higher authority,” she says, laughing at the apparent absurdity of the statement. “I don’t mean that in a kind of culty way. I’m here on the planet to make change and to help people in the best way that I can. I know what I have to do and if, in the course of doing that, some people get upset, or make fun of me, or attack me, that is not really important in the larger scheme of things.”

My next question is more cautious. That higher authority, is it God? “Yeah, God. I believe absolutely that every single one of us is here with a spiritual mission. We come in knowing it and then we forget. If we’re lucky, we re-remember. That’s part of what this book is about, helping people re-listen to their soul because their soul knows exactly what they’re supposed to be doing, even if it is not always clear it knows the direction in which to pull.”

Ms Wolf is a fairly trivial thinker, but it's always been the case that her "feminism" sits comfortably with conservatism. Her getting right with the Alpha male isn't likely to surprise anyone.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 6, 2006 7:39 AM