Chasing Sophia: Reclaiming the Lost Wisdom of Jesus
Christian spirituality for women whose faith feels at odds with their feminism.
Women are looking for new ways to know themselves and to connect with God, two forms of knowledge that are intrinsically linked. Many have left traditional religion in frustration that it didn’t reflect their real lives, turning instead to alternative spiritualities that purport to honor women’s experience. In this post-feminist interpretation of Christianity, Lilian Calles Barger challenges both Christian tradition and feminist trends in spirituality to provide a fresh and inspiring look at divine wisdom, opening women’s awareness to the voice of God in the world.
Selected Endorsement
Women and men, open-minded evangelicals, mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic Christians, participants in emerging churches and people who have left the church because of its patriarchy and chauvinism – all will find Chasing Sophia to be a truly helpful and very worthwhile read. It’s a balanced, warm, human, insightful, intelligent and deeply theological engagement with three important and inter-related subjects: Jesus, wisdom, and women. I enjoyed and benefitted from this fine book by a wise and gifted author, Lilian Calles Barger.
- Brian McLaren, author/activist (brianmclaren.net)
Lilian Barger doesn’t play games. She is honest about how her own Christian tradition has failed women, but warns that if we turn our backs on Jesus, we’ve thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Chasing Sophia will challenge women of all persuasions in their quest for true wisdom.
- Carolyn Custis James, 
author of Lost Women of the Bible and The Gospel of Ruth
Chasing Sophia is a wise guide for the many women who find themselves forging a spiritual path between traditional church and the rejection of it. Barger is a pioneer whose bracing synthesis of history, scripture and culture invites women to recognize, cultivate and speak wisdom in a world that sorely needs it.
- Diane Connolly, editor of ReligionLink.org
LC Barger offers us a light that burns off the fog of confusion, and reveals the deepest Wisdom who is timeless, hopeful, and life-giving. Wisdom, as a Person. Wisdom, with a face…
Kelly Monroe Kullberg
Author, Finding God Beyond Harvard: The Quest for Veritas (IVP, 2006)
Editor, Finding God at Harvard: Spiritual Journeys of Thinking Christians (IVP, March, 2007)
Lilian Calles Barger offers a poignant and highly readable account of her Christian feminist spirituality. With depth of insight she integrates reflections on her personal life experiences with her account of authentic Christianity in contemporary times.”
- Dr. Claire L. Sahlin, Director of Women’s Studies, Texas Woman’s University