A 'Holy Alliance'

With Faith and Feminism, Helen LaKelly Hunt has given the faith and feminist communities an engaging tool with which to reconstruct bridges that haven’t linked the two since their founding. Motivated by her own commitment to the feminist movement and her strong Christian faith, Hunt’s book is an exploration of the lives of five remarkable women who have integrated faith and activism in a way she’d like to achieve in her own life, she writes. The biographies do not stand alone but rather serve as lenses through which Hunt invites women today to read the tapestry of their own lives and to begin their own "journey toward wholeness."

Some of the women she’s chosen - such as abolitionist Sojourner Truth and suffragist Lucretia Mott - may be known to feminists, and some - such as Dorothy Day and Teresa of Ávila - to the spiritually inclined. Another, Emily Dickinson, may be known for different achievements altogether. Here, Hunt unites them under one umbrella of faith and feminism, because "their religious and spiritual lives were indivisible from their public achievements." Her examination brings to light the tremendous influence that religious faith and spiritual beliefs had on each woman’s self-understanding and sense of inherent dignity, imbuing them with the courage to struggle, in their own way, for women’s rights when such rights were not only questioned but outright denied.