Six Women Who Met God and Found a Spirituality for Today
July 1, 2024
A colloquial look at six European female Christian mystics and their teachings. Evans, the spirituality and culture editor at the National Catholic Reporter and author of Feminist Prayers for My Daughter, dedicates her latest to "every woman whose story merited an examination it never received." She focuses on the lives and work of six women--Teresa of Avila, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, Hildegard of Bingen, Th�r�se of Lisieux, and Catherine of Siena--five of whom were nuns, and all of whom Evans describes as "unapologetically themselves" and "more than able to lead." The chapters--bearing titles such as "All the Best Prophets Were Mentally Ill," "Trusting Yourself Doesn't Make You a Heretic," and "The World Is Burning: Why Make Art?"--end with questions "for prayer and reflection." For example, "Do you feel comfortable viewing your soul as a place for light?"; "If you were a flower, which one would you be? How do you feel about that flower?" The author often shares from her own life, including her journey of leaving evangelicalism and conversion to Catholicism, as well as what she views as the most prescient lessons from and summations of each of her subjects. Of Th�r�se, Evans writes, "This chick was a feminist if ever there was one." In the chapter about Hildegard, she notes, "arguably her best-known spiritual principle is the idea of the earth as a sacred mirror reflecting our internal reality." The author's impassioned, often quippy, always forthright tone makes for a quick read. "Each of us has a mystic within us," she writes, "waiting to be unlocked." Despite the text's lack of racial representation, the author calls women of color "the prophets of our modern age" before closing with lines from an Alice Walker poem. A well-meaning, resonant set of biographical profiles that will inspire religiously inclined readers.
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August 1, 2024
Dusting off the church history books, Evans (Feminist Prayers for My Daughter, 2023), spirituality and culture editor at the National Catholic Reporter, set out to examine six female mystics without the traditional lens of masculine perspective. Defining mystic as "someone who has experienced a glimpse of the eternal and has chosen to pursue more," and who has left written descriptions of these encounters that inspire a similar longing in their audience, Evans describes their writings as surprisingly forward-thinking--even progressive--lending themselves to an array of modern topics: patriarchy, social justice, and ecology. Evans relates her own life experiences and spiritual journey to these insightful women, whose personal relationships with the divine feminine foster intimacy with a loving God. Evans writes conversationally about these women as friends, not academic philosophers, who carried their faith into the world and put it into practice, sometimes raising eyebrows as they went. Eye-opening and timely, this will appeal to Christian readers who want to go deeper.
COPYRIGHT(2024) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
September 16, 2024
Evans (Feminist Prayers for My Daughter), an editor at the National Catholic Reporter, spotlights in this animated survey a half dozen Christian female mystics whose lives inform “questions of faith and liberation in our modern world.” Teresa of Ávila sublimated her sexual desires (which landed her in the convent after her father caught her in an “indiscretion with a love interest”) into intense spiritual friendships, an approach that Evans contrasts with evangelical “purity ring culture,” which constrains female sexuality and prohibits sex before marriage. (Christian notions that separate the physical from the spiritual rely on a false binary, she contends.) Elsewhere, Evans draws on the lives of Margery Kempe (to discuss mental health) and Hildegard of Bingen (to expound on environmental justice). It’s sometimes unclear which audience the author is trying to address; she celebrates the progressive views of her subjects alongside questions that seem designed for a more conservative reader (“Consider friends or loved ones who express their sexuality differently than you do. What would it look like to honor those differences?”). Still, Evans makes a solid case for reexamining female Christian thinkers who’ve been flattened by the historical record into meek models of humility and self-sacrifice. Spiritual seekers will find value in these provocative reconsiderations.