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What enables women to hold firm in their beliefs in the face of long years of hostile persecution by the Communist party/state? How do women withstand daily discrimination and prolonged hardship under a Communist regime which held rejection of religious beliefs and practices as a patriotic duty? Through the use of archival and ethnographic sources and of rich life testimonies, this book provides a rare glimpse into how women came to find solace and happiness in the flourishing, female-dominated traditions of local Islamic women's mosques, Daoist nunneries and Catholic convents in China. These women passionately - often against unimaginable odds - defended sites of prayer, education and congregation as their spiritual home and their promise of heaven, but also as their rightful claim to equal entitlements with men.

Foltz's participant observation of the Summer Solstice rituals, including witches' ceremonies, retreats, and other social events, allowed her to understand the potential of feminist spirituality for transforming, re-integrating, and healing women's identities. What most interested her was the witches' focus on meditation and visualization.

While the key to self-mastery lay in ordering the minutiae of everyday life, the Spiritual Exercises promoted self-knowledge against the backdrop of a world that, at this time, was imagined, traversed, and mapped by European Christians. The Ignatian Exercises compelled the practitioner to develop a view of herself as active in a world whose contours were rapidly transforming, at a moment when the concept of “the world” adopted the shape of a globe. “Self” and “other” were vitally linked in this series of meditative techniques that fostered a dynamic, active spirituality that linked its practitioner to the spiritual and material