Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic - by Nadya Williams (Paperback)

About the Book

Today humans are often seen as commodities rather than image bearers. Classics scholar Nadya Williams brings insight from the beliefs and practices of the early church about motherhood, raising children, and human life, suggesting there is a way to recapture a vision that affirms the imago Dei in each person above our economic production.

Book Synopsis

How we talk about human life matters.

In western post-Christian society, humans are thought of less like precious image bearers and more like commodities. The canary in the coal mine of this ideological shift is often women and children, which manifests itself in the seemingly built-in disdain towards motherhood and children for their lack of production of economically valuable goods.

However, the risk of this utilitarian approach to human life is not just outside the church, but within those spaces as well. Indeed, the commodification of human life within the contemporary body politic is so deeply embedded within the systems, even the church has lost touch with some of the ways it inherently devalues the lives of women and children.

Classics scholar Nadya Williams draws from voices both ancient and modern to illuminate how Christians can value human life amidst an empire that seeks to dehumanize that which is most precious. Bringing insights from the beliefs and practices of the early church in Greco-Roman context about motherhood, raising children, and human life, Williams suggests there is a way to recapture a vision that affirms the imago Dei in each person over and above our economic contribution to society.

Review Quotes

"I read Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic in fits and starts, exhausted because my baby has adopted a new (worse) sleep schedule and my own schedule has yet to adapt. But it seemed an apt method for engaging Nadya Williams's work here, a scholarly yet conversational and timely examination of how Christianity transformed a casually cruel culture, how our society increasingly resembles its pagan past, and how we can better value mothers, children, and indeed all image-bearers of God."

--Bonnie Kristian, editorial director of ideas and books at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy and A Flexible Faith

"In this deeply learned and readable book, Christian classicist Nadya Williams takes readers on a tour of pre-Christian societies and the ideas that animated them. Exposing their views about, and treatment of, women and children, Williams uncovers just how revolutionary the Judeo-Christian worldview--in particular, the imago Dei--has been for the equal dignity of women. Those on both the left and right today who wish to trade in Christianity for the paganism of the pre-Christian world--and think women and children will be just fine--would do well to heed Williams's cautionary tale. I pray it gets a wide reading."

--Erika Bachiochi, ethics and public policy legal scholar and author of The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision

"In this far-seeing, deeply personal book, Nadya Williams offers the gift of intelligent, alert, learned conviction--a beam of light aimed at dark corners of our lives and our world, past and present. She not only exposes us for who we're not, but she also shows us who we might yet become. It's a vision no Christian can afford to miss."

--Eric Miller, professor of history and the humanities at Geneva College

"In this moving, pastoral book, Nadya Williams plumbs the long history of assumptions and practices that culminate in what Pope Francis has termed our 'throwaway' culture. In the same way that the early Christian church dismantled the Roman Empire's commodification of human persons, so the gospel continues to bear witness to the intrinsic value of all humans, even those society deems useless. Williams wears her considerable learning lightly, and readers will find her narrative brings both illumination and conviction."

--Jeffrey Bilbro, associate professor of English at Grove City College and editor-in-chief at Front Porch Republic

"Nadya Williams has the great ability to bring together good history and contemporary application without being cheesy or ignoring nuance. In this volume, she ably helps us see how both a Judeo-Christian account of the imago Dei and the gospel's call to radical and sacrificial love were revolutionary in the ancient Greco-Roman world, and how these two realities remain revolutionary in our own dehumanizing world. Read Williams not simply to learn about the past but to be inspired for the present!"

--Kelly M. Kapic, professor of theological studies at Covenant College and author of You're Only Human

"Parents tempted to optimize every aspect of children's experiences, beware. Those very efforts may make us complicit in devaluing human life, especially of mothers and children. Nadya Williams warns that few Americans are exempt from cultural imperatives assigning a price to everything--even human beings. The author's deep knowledge of history and poetry of the pre-Christian Roman world makes her a perceptive guide through its brutalities too, some of which bear disturbing likeness to our own. Then Jesus came, and the soul felt its worth: the author reminds us that the gospel recognizes every soul as precious. Williams bids readers to transform pro-life concerns into commitment to full human flourishing."

--Agnes Howard, author of Showing: What Pregnancy Tells Us About Being Human

About the Author

Nadya Williams (PhD, Princeton) walked away from academia after fifteen years as a professor of History and Classics. She is now a homeschool mom, Book Review Editor at Current, and a Contributing Editor at Providence Magazine. She is the author of Cultural Christians in the Early Church (Zondervan Academic, 2023), and numerous articles and essays in Current, Plough, Christianity Today, Front Porch Republic, Fairer Disputations, Law and Liberty, Church Life Journal, and others. She and her husband, Dan, are parents to one adult son and two children still at home. They live and homeschool in Ashland, a small town near Cleveland, Ohio.