<p>The Goddess is returning! </p> <p>She takes shape in the hands of an Episcopal priest's shy, retiring wife. She invades the dreams of a grande dame who thinks women priests are a scandal. She lures a poker-playing ex-convict onto unfamiliar terrain, literally. Then there is the mysterious old man in the wood, who's been watching, waiting for a sign of her return. </p> <p>Who <em>is</em> the Goddess? Where has she been for so long? What does she want from the four human beings whose lives she is turning upside down and inside out?</p> <p> As they confront these questions, Esther, Spencer, Marvin and Fergus find themselves drawn together, forging friendships across boundaries of age, class and race, discovering--and recovering--powerful, erotic passions. All their encounters, with themselves and each other, lead them deeper into Blackwood, an old estate that shelters an imperiled grove of trees sacred to the Goddess, a grove it becomes their mission to save. </p> <p><em>The Return of the Goddess, A Divine Comedy</em> marks Cunningham's first explicit exploration of Christianity and the power of a divine feminine, long forgotten, obscured, and suppressed by the Church. She went on to write The Maeve Chronicles, featuring her iconic, outspoken Celtic Magdalen. <em>The Return of the Goddess</em> and her most recent novel, <em>Murder at the Rummage Sale</em>, take the reader inside the world of Cunningham's origins where a gap in a wall leads from the church to the sacred grove. </p> <p>Twenty-five years after its first publication <em>The Return of the Goddess, A Divine Comedy </em>remains a classic in what has become a movement, both within established religions and beyond, to reclaim the goddess and to embody her return.</p>