And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy

June 12, 2017
Essayist and columnist Shirk embarks on a quest to discover the diversity of American women’s spirituality across the centuries. A mix of travelogue, memoir, and spiritual journey, this eclectic collection of essays, remembrances, anecdotes, and histories reveals Shirk’s desire to “overthrow the monopoly of the pulpit” in order to highlight the contributions of women philosophers, writers, and spiritual leaders who have inspired her. Traveling across the country, Shirk writes about Mary Baker Eddy’s founding of Christian Science, Flannery O’Connor’s Catholic beliefs, Linda Goodman’s mix of astrology and religious doctrine, Aimee Semple McPherson’s Pentecostal faith healing, Eliza Snow’s writing on the role of women in the Mormon church, and Sojourner Truth’s optimism and belief in the Holy Spirit. Shirk travels to New Orleans to research the life of voodoo queen Marie Laveau, visits the Lily Dale Spiritualism colony to commune with the departed, and attends a Lakota yuwipi healing ceremony. Shirk writes with sincerity as she calmly details events, observations, and conjectures. In these stirring vignettes, she mixes historical accounts, interpretations, and fictionalized encounters to provide insight into her personal journey tracing the steps of American women who have sought out an alternative spirituality.

June 15, 2017
Women on the fringes of the spiritual world.In her first book, Shirk (Women's Studies, English, and Creative Writing/Pratt Institute) seeks to examine why American women have "had to find their own ways [to divinity] outside the prescribed patriarchal orders," but the narrative is too autobiographical and scattered to fully deliver on that promise. The author, whose eccentric family has roots in both the early Anabaptist movement and the Christian Science church, weaves her own journey of spiritual discovery throughout the book. Tied only to the edges of faith traditions, her journey leaves her mostly without answers. "If I have learned anything," she notes, "it's that the truth shifts. The modes by which to interrogate it must always change, and are always changing." Each chapter revolves erratically around a central theme. In some cases, those themes fit her thesis well--e.g., explorations of early Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, Christian Science founder Mary Baker Eddy, and New Orleans voodoo priestess Marie Laveau. In some cases, the tie is more tenuous, as in her chapter on Sojourner Truth, in which Shirk compares Truth to her own grandmother. A chapter on Flannery O'Connor is obscured by a focus on New York City, and other chapters have little apparent bearing on the subject matter. In one chapter, the author spends pages on the subject of smoking, and another focuses on her brother's mental illness. Feminism, family relations, and other similar subjects come into play, but the digressions serve only to pull readers away from the author's main subject, and the occasional profanity sprinkled throughout seems forced. Rather than a book about women who have acted as spiritual leaders, this is a story about the author and her own search for identity. Some nuggets of insight are overwhelmed by a rambling, unavailing narrative.

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July 1, 2017
Shirk's collection of essays focuses on well-known female religious figures like Aimee Semple McPherson, Sojourner Truth, and Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, and the lesser-known Marie Laveau, a voodoo priestess, and Eliza Snow, one of Joseph Smith's wives and a Mormon leader in her own right. A thoughtful essay on the writer Flannery O'Connor is one of numerous other delights found here. A book with such a wide range of subjects might be written by numerous authors, but Shirk authors this collection solo, occasionally adopting different styles and voiceseven occasionally tapping into a quasi stream of consciousness. Shirk's own religious background ranges from family who are staunchly antireligious to her (many) mainstream religious experiences. Just when readers think they know what to expect, Shirk adds a nonreligious essay about the feminist takeover of a New York building in the 1970s. Readers could pick and choose essays, but they would be doing themselves a disservice, as the panoply of writing also serves as a memoir of Shirk's life and thought.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)