bell hooks’ Spiritual Vision: Buddhist, Christian, and Feminist

While bell hooks is celebrated for trailblazing contributions to gender theory, political discourse, and Black feminist thought, the role spirituality played in shaping her outlook has been neglected, contends journalist Nittle (Toni Morrison’s Spiritual Vision) in this uneven corrective. According to Nittle, much of hooks’s political thought is rooted in a “Buddhist-Christian” notion of love as an action that fosters community and dismantles oppressive social structures—and as the “source of true connection with others,” is “the one force” capable of vanquishing “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy.” Nittle probes periods of hooks’s life that molded her spiritual ethos, including a traumatic childhood that ignited a “spiritual awakening”; her growing disillusionment with traditional forms of Christianity starting in adolescence; her introduction to Buddhism in the 1970s; and her discovery of writing as a personal “destiny” and a means to “find her way to her spiritual home.” While Nittle provides enriching context for some of hooks’s thought, particularly by situating her notions of spirituality in relation to second-wave feminism, the book too often reads as a hagiographic rehashing of her work, marred by lengthy tangents—among them a dissection of hooks’s critique of Beyoncé’s Lemonade album and the public ire her criticism incited—that preclude a coherent argumentative arc. This comes up short. (Nov.)