Between 60 and 80 people, mostly women, usually attend TOP. Our chronological ages range from the 20s to the 80s. In our past and present religious orientations we are Jewish, Roman Catholic, mainline Protestant, Unitarian Universalist, Quaker, Buddhist, post-Christian, Goddess and non-religious. We are single, married, divorced, widowed, remarried, heterosexual, bisexual and lesbian. We are daughters, sisters, wives, mothers, aunts, great-aunts and grandmothers. Most, not all, of us are white; most, not all, of us are middle-class. We are teachers, clergy, housewives, psychotherapists, physicists, business women, lawyers, architects, authors, composers, singers, gardeners, caregivers, artists, and craftswomen. Our participants are a very intelligent, sensitive and responsive group to speak to.

Participants drive up to two-and-a-half hours to come to our Thursday half-days. We mail to about 1400 alumni in Greater Boston, Eastern Massachusetts, Cape Cod, Rhode Island, a few in Hartford CT and the Amherst MA area, a few in Vermont, a considerable number in southern New Hampshire, and a few in Maine. We also mail to 600 churches and synagogues. We typically get 3 to 10 new attenders each Thursday. Most come because a friend brings them. Since 1973 more than 4,300 have participated.

Elizabeth Dodson Gray has been TOP’s coordinator since 1978, and she has attended TOP since its beginning in 1973.

Who is Elizabeth Dodson Gray, in addition to her role at TOP?

She has her graduate professional degree from Yale Divinity School and she speaks and writes as a feminist theologian. She sees herself as an heir and critic of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

For the twenty years from 1975 to 1995 she was away two or three times a month lecturing in the U.S. and in Canada on campuses, at regional and national conferences, and in church-related settings.

Her lecturing was an outgrowth of work she and her husband David did at MIT’s Sloan School of Management for a multi-year seminar on "Critical Choices for the Future," an anticipation of today’s energy concerns and global climate issues. In 1973 they prepared with another MIT colleague the staff work for ten days of Congressional hearings in the 93rd Congress.

Her own first book, Green Paradise Lost, asked why did we ever think we could get away with treating nature so badly. It is now viewed as one of two classic eco-feminist texts.

Her second book, Patriarchy as a Conceptual Trap, condemns what since the Middle Ages Christian theology has called the Great Chain of Being—the cosmic hierarchy which she finds rooted in the patriarchal "ranking of diversity" which begins with men ranking men above women. Ranking diversity is the conceptual trap.

In 1988 she edited Sacred Dimensions of Women’s Experience. This book was based upon the 1985 Fall TOP series. It is by 31 women, writing autobiographically, and is about the religious dimensions of those portions of the total human experience which males never experience—and therefore have never named as sacred (for example, women bringing life in childbirth).

In 1994 she wrote Sunday School Manifesto: In the Image of Her?, contrasting the woman-affirming accounts of Jesus in the gospels with subsequent centuries of woman-denigrating Christian theology and practice. She notes that Christian theology and churches have never repented of this history of denigrating women.

The Advisory Committee is an open group of women which meets with the Coordinator to plan TOP's fall and spring conferences. Not everyone comes every time. But over the afternoons of the planning process 30 to 40 women participate in giving shape to each new series.

People who took part in the Advisory Committee most recently include: