A journey of a dozen blocks begins with a single step—in my case, stepping into the front seat of a cab on the Harvard campus while Gloria Steinem stepped into the back. My eyes were still red from crying. How I got there is another story.

Last October, Harvard Divinity School and the John F. Kennedy School of Government co-sponsored a conference titled "Core Connections: Women, Religion, and Public Policy." Admirably, the conference's organizers tried to include in the mix women that don't usually get invited to such shindigs, such as evangelical Christians. To recruit these attendees, Ambassador Swanee Hunt, director of the Women and Public Policy Program at the JFK School, enlisted the help of her sister, June Hunt, evangelical author and host of the Hope for the Heart radio broadcast. A third sister, Helen Hunt, director of the Sisters Fund (not the actress), provided funding for the conference.

During the conference, the two dozen evangelical women who attended would meet in the hallways and over coffee to chat. Yes, we seemed to constitute only about ten percent of the participants. Yes, the plenary and panel speakers were heavily weighted toward a perspective different from our own. Yes, reflexive disdain for evangelicals kept popping up during question-and-answer periods, so much so that none of us felt comfortable getting into the question lines.

Nevertheless, we could tell the organizers and other participants were trying. There was a genuine desire to broaden their awareness of the range of political and religious viewpoints women bear. Most slights were not intentional, but more in the nature of oversights—simple unfamiliarity with others' beliefs. All in all, it was good to be there.

Friday night I participated in a small group discussion about the high rate of childlessness among high-achieving women. The setting gave me an opportunity to hold forth on some of my cranky ex-feminist ideas. I explained that I thought feminism went astray in the mid- to late 70s, when it abandoned its early hippie style with its "mother earth" flavor. Though naive, that strain of feminism at least affirmed women's domestic and child-rearing lives. Later "power feminism" adopted the contrary view, that housewives were stupid and that value came only from corporate success. Ironically, this was exactly what "male chauvinists" thought; feminism adopted a contemptuous male attitude toward women's work and rejected that which our foremothers had found honorable and fulfilling. (Of course, the male model—that career comes before all else—has never been all that healthy for men, either.)

Helen Hunt happened to be present in this small group, and told me afterward that she was very intrigued by my comments (though, frankly, I don't know if they were all that original). As we parted that evening she said, "Feminists need to hear from you on this."

The next night the closing plenary speaker was Gloria Steinem, and I arrived late, as usual. The place, a small amphitheater, was jammed. One solitary seat was open, right in the middle of the front row. I settled in there next to my friend, Lilian Calles Barger of the Damaris Project, and we prepared to hear a legend speak.

The speech was a bit nonlinear and seemed to be coming nearly off the top of Gloria's head; as she turned pages we could see they were handwritten in pen, as if recently dashed off. As she spoke of the confluence of religion and politics, it became apparent that Gloria is of the school that religion is a resource to be reinterpreted and reinvented. Indeed, this seemed to be the governing presumption of the conference. The presumption is that we should explore the spiritual realm and discover what best pleases and supports us, while discarding the rest. Spirituality is a powerful resource that women have too long neglected, they would say. Much of it is stale and patriarchal, though, so we must sieve through it to select those elements that seem true and right to us.

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