This collection challenges normative, fixed, and universal interpretations of the Devī Māhātmyam, a central Hindu mythical-text for goddess worship. Authors in this anthology animate, resituate, and resignify this mythical-text across social worlds. The text is viewed as a living “mnemotext,” where myth functions as memory and method, enabling creative rearticulations and reclamations in areas of leadership, war, peace, diplomacy, reproductive justice, gender equality, grief, psychological resilience, and spiritual empowerment. Through decolonial, social justice, feminist, ecowomanist, psychological, thealogical, philosophical, poetic, memoir, creative fiction, auto-ethnographic, and interdisciplinary approaches, contributors seek not merely to demystify but to remystify the mythical-text for our times. In doing so, they demonstrate the complex entangled interrelationship between myth, subjectivity, women and society, gender, race, species, and the Earth, and how this ancient wisdom of the feminine principle might help us address the ethical and planetary challenges we face today.

Dr. Pravina Rodrigues is Assistant Professor of Comparative Theology, Ethics, and Interreligious Studies at Starr King School for the Ministry in Oakland, California. She is Editor-in-Chief of Springer's Journal of Dharma Studies and Co-Chair of the American Academy of Religion, Western Region's Dharma and Goddess Studies Unit.

Dr. Rodrigues holds a PhD in Theology and Ethics from the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. She is also the associate editor of the thirty-four-chapter volume Religion & Sustainability: Interreligious Resources, Interdisciplinary Responses (2022), published as part of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals Series. She was a postdoctoral fellow at the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University in Berkeley, California (2021–2022), and served as a Newhall Teaching Fellow (2017, 2018, and 2020) and an Interreligious Collaborative Research Fellow (2019) at the Graduate Theological Union. 

Her recent publication, A Śākta Method for Comparative Theology: Upside Down, Inside Out (Lexington Books, 2024), offers a Hindu perspective on comparative theology, theology of religions, and interreligious dialogue. Her research interests include postcolonial and decolonial studies, Hindu-Christian comparative theology, interfaith theology, comparative mysticism, and Śākta thealogy.