Biography
Freya is a third-year doctoral candidate in theology at the University of Cambridge. Her research examines feminist engagements with pantheism and panentheism, with particular attention to questions of divine immanence, embodiment, and relationality. She also works with disability theology and process thought, exploring how dependence and interconnection reshape contemporary understandings of God, existence, and ecological belonging.
Paper Abstract
Feminist theologians have increasingly turned to pan(en)theistic frameworks to return faith to its physical, earthly roots - to re-ground theological imagination in the materiality of bodies, ecologies, and the living world. Yet the field’s embrace of pan(en)theism, with its persistent and awkward (en), reveals deeper internal tensions surrounding divine–world relationality. While pantheologies and panentheologies alike seek to resist patriarchal dualisms, many feminist accounts remain committed to a form of boundary maintenance in which some degree of distance between God and existence is deemed necessary for genuine freedom and relationality. This move reinscribes a subtle hierarchy: creation must remain separate enough from God to avoid absorption, yet close enough to manifest divine nearness.
This paper argues that such reliance on panentheism’s structuring distance is not the only, nor the most coherent, way forward for feminist theology. A feminist theological vision that takes interdependence, vulnerability, and immanence seriously - especially as articulated within disability theology - requires no such protective separation. When dependence rather than autonomy is centred as a theological good, relationality no longer relies on ontological distance but on mutual embeddedness.
Drawing on disability theology’s reframing of dependence as constitutive of identity, and engaging Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s constructive proposal of plural pantheism, I suggest an alternative rooted vision of the divine–world relation. Plural pantheism imagines God as fully, physically present in the material earth while preserving the distinctiveness of persons and communities through their entangled, dynamic relations. It allows feminist theology to move beyond the limiting logic of panentheism’s boundary lines, offering instead a model in which identity is formed through relation rather than separation.
In returning to the ‘roots’ of divine immanence - the soil, the body, the shared vulnerability of existence - this paper proposes a feminist pantheology capable of grounding hope, belonging, and liberative relationality for the future.