Feminist thinking, however, has tended to widen the arc, so that we are not looking for linear patterns of causality between two mutually exclusive poles of religious teaching and social development. Instead we find ourselves gazing at a firmament of constellations of interrelated causality between ideational realities and social conditions, between articulated language and unarticulated assumptions, between the subjugation of women and the exploitation of nature, between patriarchy and other structures of power. The perennial problem of the relation between ideas and their expression, on the one hand, and concrete social structures and power relationships, on the other hand, remains unresolved. But it is held within this broader conceptual network of mutual and interacting causality.