The Mystics Would Like a Word: Six Women Who Met God and Found a Spirituality for Today

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. (Sept.)