Inspirational books are big business these days. The literati may sneer at them, but the general public buys them by the armload and their enormous popularity indicates a genuine spiritual hunger that should be taken seriously.

Women, who seem to be feeling the spiritual crisis more keenly, buy the majority of these books. Despite the social gains made by women this century, a lot of modern women still feel torn by the choices confronting them, and can’t find guidance in traditional religion because it hasn’t caught up with the changes in their lives.

Lucinda Vardey, the author of Belonging: A Book for the Questioning Catholic Today, and co-compiler of Mother Theresa’s A Simple Path, has made a noble attempt to create a feminist spirituality with some depth in her newest anthology, The Flowering of the Soul: A Book of Prayers by Women. However, the book suffers from the same flaws that mar so much of current inspirational writing for women. Instead of accepting that life in the late 20th century will inevitably cause spiritual conflicts that can shape and strengthen the spirit, The Flowering of the Soul tries to dissolve women’s struggles by candy-coating negative or destructive impulses. I think of it as a sort of “Tepid Chamomile Tea for the Soul.”

The Flowering of the Soul is ambitious in intent, but clumsy and unsatisfying in execution. It is poorly organized and long on feel-good platitudes but short on intellectual rigour and spiritual clarity. In the name of a feminist commitment to diversity, Vardey includes many questionable choices and dilutes the effect. Treating the soppy effusions of New Age hucksters like Riane Eisler or Starhawk as though they carry the same spiritual weight as the work of the formidable St. Teresa of Avila is an insult to the highly accomplished Renaissance nun. And putting religious poems by Sappho and Emily Dickinson up against embarrassments like “Mother of the World, Woman Carpenter, You Are the Courage of the Poor and Downtrodden,” by Mary Kathleen Speegle Schmitt, only makes the weakness of the latter more glaring.

As well, including the work of Muslim, Hindu, and Buddhist women with only a sketchy description of the very different belief systems they represent misses a good opportunity to remedy some of the areas in which the Judeo-Christian tradition is deficient. Sexuality, for example, is central to Hinduism in a way that has never been possible in Christianity, but Vardey seems to think that the issue of sexuality has already been solved: “The sexual liberation of the last 40 years and the more recent interest in goddess worship and mind/body therapies have helped to make the human body much better understood and loved than ever before.” Call me a nasty cynic, but aren’t there still pitched cultural battles being fought over sexual mores?