Women of Vision: An Anthology of Spiritual Words from Women Across the Centuries

Women of Vision: An Anthology of Spiritual Words from Women Across the Centuries. Compiled by Dorothy Stewart. Revived and expanded edition. Chicago: Loyola Press, 2000. 260 pp. $17.95 (cloth).

Dorothy Stewart's thoughtful compilation of women's prayers and meditations will provide many lovers and collectors of spiritual and devotional works with a delightful little volume of inspirational writings. Following her successful volume, Women of Prayer (Loyola Press, 1999), this anthology draws upon sources from across the centuries of the Common Era that offer women's perspectives and perceptions of prayer, patience, faith, grace, death and dying, evil, daily work, justice, love, life, and thanksgiving in relationship to God. The majority of authors are contemporary women living and theologizing in Christian and post-Christian contexts.

The reader will find a number of familiar and not so well known women of vision past and present: Sts. Julie Billiart, Clare of Assisi, and Teresa of Avila; Evelyn Underhill, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Dorothy Sayers; Margaret Hebbelthwaite, Janet Morley, and Catherine Marshall LeSourd; Hannah More, Lucie Christine, and Elizabeth Fry; Margaret Holden, Valerie Hadert, and Mary Endersbee; Maria Boulding, Sylvia Mary Alison, and Sr. Mary Cecilia. Saints, mystics, spiritual writers, priests, nuns, and quintessential laywomen are well represented. There is a wide variety of view-points and perspectives to be found in these pages.

Like many contemporary Christian women, I am hungry for women's words and women's wisdom; I am always on the lookout for writings by women who bring a feminist perspective to their works. This is not a collection of feminist writings by any stretch of the imagination. Contributor Lin Berwick, a Methodist lay preacher, in a moving passage about the witness of social outcasts, points to "the healing of the blind man, the man who was sick of the palsy, the man with the withered hand" (p. 62). Why not the woman at the well, the Syro-Phoenecian woman, or the woman who was bent over? Many of these voices could not be pinpointed as those of women if they were presented anonymously. Yet, regardless of where one falls on the ideological spectrum, this collection will provide the reader with food for thought.

I was particularly moved by a passage from Marta Wilhelmsson: "It suddenly strikes me with overwhelming force: It was women who were the first to spread the message of Easter-the unheard of! It was women who rushed to the disciples, who breathless and bewildered, passed on the greatest message of all: He is alive! Think if women had kept silence in the churches!" (p. 189). This mirrors my own epiphany when I was first exposed to feminist liberation theology at Harvard Divinity School in the eighties. I became a Christian because of the witness of many of my classmates and faculty, female and male, who shared the Good News that women were the first witnesses to the Resurrection. This passage allowed me to revisit the experience of coming to Christ. It was an experience of overwhelming force.

I recommend this little volume to lay and ordained people alike as a companion to daily prayer and as a source for inspiration-and quotations!for sermon preparation.

PRISCILLA BATES-MAKARIAS

Visiting Scholar, Episcopal Divinity School Cambridge, Massachusetts

Copyright Anglican Theological Review, Inc. Winter 2002
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