Sally Cunneen.

Sally Cunneen, professor emeritus at Rockland Community College, is author of In Search of Mary: The Woman and the Symbol (Ballantine).

Two personal cross-cultural explorations have helped widen the meaning of women's struggles today for me. Elizabeth Fernea's In Search of Islamic Feminism: One Woman's Global Journey (Doubleday, $14, 448 pp.) gives readers access to the lives and views of a diverse set of Muslim women in middle eastern countries from Iraq, Morocco, and Egypt to Saudi Arabia and Palestine/Israel. Fernea knows them well, having lived and raised her children among them. She has also written books and made award-winning documentary films about Arab women, and now returns as a grandmother to see how they are coping at a time of rising commitment to Islam. Including enough context to show how history affects each country differently and how class as well as religion shapes the responses of the women she meets, Fernea finds a powerful commitment on their part to help other women educationally and economically. Most distinguish between repressive realities and the Islamic ideal for which they struggle, and have devised winning strategies for pursuing women's equality within their patriarchal societies. This relaxed, inside look at Muslim households and public life from a trained, sympathetic observer opens a window on a world few Americans get a chance to see.

The mythic potential and the social reality of women's existence is beautifully entwined in China Galland's spiritual search for the feminine divine in The Bond Between Women: A Journey to Fierce Compassion (Riverhead, $14, 344 pp.). The author takes us to crowded festivals in Nepal, Calcutta, and Rio, celebrating both compassionate goddesses and the Black Madonna, whose tales she intersperses with visits to their shrines. Drawn almost against her will into the sufferings of those around her, she begins to include portraits of real women helping the poorest of the poor in each place she visits. "The divine feminine," she realizes, "needs our hands, our eyes, our hearts too!" Galland's story is original and moving, written with the skill of a good novelist.

Shusaku Endo was one of the very few novelists in the latter part of our century to create works that effectively communicated an encounter with the sacred. Rereading his last novel, Deep River (New Directions, $19.95, 216 pp.), I was impressed by the convincing way he exposes the spiritual aridity of secular, consumer culture while observing a group of Japanese tourists on a pilgrimage to the holy sites of India.

Despite the diverse attitudes to faith of his four chief characters who come together at the holy river Ganges, each somehow finds enough insight to overcome despair and loneliness. Isobe, unable to find the dead wife who asked him to look for her, discovers with increasing pain how little he paid attention to her in life and how deeply he misses her. Kaguchi, bathing in the Ganges, is able to shed the terror and guilt of wartime cannibalism. Numada, recovering from a critical illness, releases a myna bird in an Indian bird sanctuary as reparation to the dead bird that had been his closest companion in the hospital. Mitsuko, whose story is the most complex, follows Otsu, a seemingly failed priest she both despises and unconsciously admires, to his pathetic death while carrying the dying poor of Varanasi to the cremation grounds. The tension in this relationship is the center of Endo's novel; he does not prettify either the clownlike, innocent Otsu or the intelligent, cynical Matsuko. Though she, too, immerses herself in the holy river that seems deep enough to embrace the sorrows of humanity, she still resists Otsu's God. She has been moved only by the goddess Chamunda, who lives in graveyards and offers her withered breasts to the children who line up before her. In his poignant final novel, Endo projects a distinctively Japanese Christianity, merging his Catholicism with the beliefs of other world religions without turning a complex novel into a homily.

Anyone who likes family stories told with insight and artistry should find Carol DeChant's joyous, well-researched memoir a rare treat. Recreating the crises, relationships, and accidents of her Midwestern relatives in Momma's Enchanted Supper...and other stories for the long evenings of Advent (Loyola University Press, $17.95, 240 pp.), the author evokes periods and events in recent American history that pull the reader into the text. The lives of these aunts, uncles, cousins, and parents are touched by Nikita Khruschev, John F. Kennedy, Babe Zaharias, and Chicago mobsters. Who can forget Momma's words of wisdom: "The reason nuns have no wrinkles is that they have no children."

Though the tone is deeply comic, the narrator and characters carry on a running dialogue with biblical texts, questioning them, and squeezing meaning out of them. DeChant's greatest achievement is to show that life gives meaning to the text, not the reverse. Daily life is beautifully rendered here, complete with hats, shoes, menus, and dances, as well as the inevitable illnesses and death. These stories are a revelation.