Diving Deep and Surfacing reveals how the writings of Kate Chopin, Margaret Atwood, Doris Lessing, Adrienne Rich, and Ntozake Shange can inform women's search for spiritual renewal. A new afterword testifies to the importance of spiritual autobiography for women.

First published in 1980, "Diving Deep and Surfacing" continues to find new readers as women both young and old search for stories that value their struggles, celebrate their strengths, and comprehend their pain. In the moving new afterword to this fifteenth anniversary edition, Christ reveals how she came to understand on a deeper and more personal level what it means to be 'closed in silence,' and why women's stories must be told.

This is a work of first importance to the developing women's spirituality movement, to (feminist) theologians, and to anyone interested in religious experience. —Judith Plaskow, Religious Studies Review