Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity

“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!”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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”

“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.”