Marriage, too, had its challenges, and failed after many years. Joanna expresses little personal bitterness, but notes that broader structural forces placed an impossible burden upon a couple intent upon maintaining two careers while raising a "traditional" family. Through all this journey was a personal sexual awakening which seemed to pit experience against the received wisdom of the church. It is from this story of the discovery of herself as a sexual being that this book takes its power.

Joanna Manning's primary argument is that our theology must heed the woman's experience, particularly the woman's experience as sexual being, not merely because our theological reflections might be graced by new insights, but because our survival as a species may well depend upon the woman's perspective. Sexual expression as the fulfillment of a loving relationship demands of us an intimacy, an empathy, an honouring of the other which ripples beyond our simple dyadic relationships and affects the way we encounter all creation.

Traveling this path, Joanna finds herself coming face to face with environmental destruction, unbridled consumption, rampant disease whose pathology is more political than biological, antiquated economic structures which drive a growing wedge between rich and poor, and an androcentric religious hierarchy which is complicit in all the west's greatest evils. How can we draw our behaviours into check before we destroy ourselves?

In answer to this challenge, Joanna proposes the "Magdalene Moment," which begins by recovering Mary of Magdala. She suggests that we must deconstruct the church's traditional feminine pair — virgin and whore — and set in its place a more honest account of the feminine which neither shies from nor denigrates female sexuality. A more honest account of the feminine can be grounded in a more honest account of the Marys, one that engages the history of Israel at that time, that weighs "competing" sources such as the gnostic writings, and that accepts the likelihood that Jesus the man was Jesus the sexual man who, as rabbi, would likely have taken a wife, possibly Mary of Magdala. With the full participation of women in the life of the early church, there is no reason to have excluded them through subsequent centuries down to the present.