For the Ploughshares blog, I wrote a critical essay about Natalie Carnes’s memoir Motherhood: A Confession.

“For Augustine, as for most of the influential thinkers in the Christian tradition, the woman’s body is a site of temptation, to be renounced in favor of devotion to God. What do we lose in our understanding of human nature when we do not take the woman’s body—its loves and vices, its will—seriously as a site for theological inquiry? What if such a detailed exploration of human desire as the Confessions were rendered not by a man, but by a mother? This is the question that animates Natalie Carnes’s 2020 memoir Motherhood: A Confession.”⁠

Read in full here.