My mom. Many of us can imagine our own mothers as holy, but we have limited imaginations for holy mothers beyond ours and Jesus’s. Amy Marga takes this fault of our imagination and, as any good academic does, she turns the idea of the Christian mother inside out and sets it straight again. She introduces us to women we should know and gives us the dignity of their complicated stories. This is one simple reason to read her book: people should know Paula (and Perpetua, and Felicity, and…).

Felicity prayed to God for a premature birth for her child, so that she could hand it off and die in the arena with her fellow Christians sooner. God answered her prayer. She turned her newborn premature infant over and faced her death. We don’t know if she found a wetnurse, nor how the child of Felicity, a slave, could even find sufficient care. That was the point. These stories Marga highlights are the stories of women who radically put higher things over lower things. With single-minded devotion to God, the highest thing, even their own children were lower things. Children. Those of us who might jot down my mom as our role models of faith.

The book does not serve as an apologetic for such behaviors, but it complicates our received notions of Christian motherhood—mainly shaped by Mary and mommy bloggers (the Holy Household faced significant domestication after the Reformation). While we often associate maternity with sanctity, we also often conflate motherhood with sanctification.  Christianity has a unique role in the entrenchment of holy motherhood in the West. Marga (and I) believe this gives us a unique obligation to grapple with it more seriously.

This book is fundamentally an academic book. Amy Marga is an academic, with a Ph.D. from Princeton Theological Seminary and a faculty post at Luther Seminary. Her writing is archival and theoretical, dense and interdisciplinary, tightly argued and exploratory. Since women’s voices, and mother’s voices in particular, are glaringly absent from our records, by fact of factlessness, Marga must engage with philosophy of science, theology, psychology, obstetrics, race theory, and history to draw out enough material to critically engage with the changing definitions and dispositions towards Christian motherhood through time. In her calling for canon-building, she offers up these many rich veins that require more exploration. Marga is many things, but she is not a scientist, obstetrician, nor psychologist. She is the woman who was clever enough to invite all of them, and many others, into this conversation. Of my many reasons to recommend the book, this is the most mercenary. This book needs to be widely read by people of wide-ranging expertise so that they write more books and flesh out Marga’s project. As a selfish reviewer, I want more to read. I want the canon, not just its first book.