Whether or not philosophy is purely personal (hello, Nietzsche) is itself a question for philosophical inquiry. *shrug* And if philosophy is personal, and if God's relationship to me is as well, like the size of my shoes and the distance I have to cover, then it's in perfectly good company to my way of thinking. I just worry that the tendency, once this has been broached, is to then curtail any serious discussion in favor of an increasingly privatized spirituality, whether that manifests in a philosophical or a theological mode.

But in any case, the gender war seems to be especially virulent in our theology department. It's really polarized the graduate student body, on top of an already divided program, where it seems that within the three tracks, there are extremely few friends across the subdisciplinary lines. One gets suggestions from second hand reports that often, professors do a poor job presenting feminist theology and a wretched job of dealing with the philosophy informing theology, which, when added to all that, just makes for a collegial and educational disaster.

It's actually kind of horrifically fascinating to watch from a distance, but at the same time, highly depressing, to say nothing of the resulting alienation of all parties that certainly goes counter to the more communal modes of thinking and theorizing supposedly promoted by feminists of a non-separatist strand.

Dwim