You can't tell about a book by its cover

My Congregation uses an electronic bulletin board, as do many, as a means of communications with and among the membership. Yesterday a Sister wrote that she had been told by a friend of a very good book that the Sisters might want to know about: 

A friend "sent a notice of a book she thought might interest us. It is 'Embracing Age: How Catholic Nuns Became Models of Aging Well' by Anna Corwin, published by Rutgers Press.

I felt compelled to respond, in the interests of the passion I have for getting the REAL facts of aging and later life to others, especially my Sisters around the world .What follows is my critique of this book.

I was asked by Rutgers University Press to review the book last Fall, pre-publication, and I was eager to do so as I heard just a few weeks earlier from a colleague that this professor at St. Mary’s in Moraga, CA was doing research related to Sisters and aging. (She writes from her lens and research methods as a linguistic anthropologist.) However, I was greatly disappointed by the book and told the editor I could not recommend it. This is what raises red flags for me about Corwin’s work and what I noted to Corwin’s editor. 

Corwin lived with a community of Franciscan Sisters here in the Midwest (Illinois or Indiana) for quite some time in doing her research with them. Anthropologists study cultures. Her research data comes from that one group, that one culture. However, she draws conclusions about the attitudes of Sisters across the country, lacking any data beyond one Midwestern Congregation. Overreach, clearly. 

My connections with many congregations over the past several years bears out the lack of validity in such sweeping conclusions, reaching far beyond Corwin’s limited scientific investigation. As much as we Sisters are called to be countercultural, we’re not, in many areas. LCWR’s focus on racism and its encouragement that member Congregations delve deeply into this injustice bears that out. The implicit, unconscious bias of ageism in our Western society blinds us to recognizing and thus addressing it. 

She comments on the meaning of the vows, community life, leaving home, etc. and how Sisters feel about this life-event without any real validity or research data. She does try to buttress her conclusions with referenced footnotes, but they are rather generic references and outdated. One of them is a reference to medieval monastic rules. Throughout, there is no sense, much less, any expression of a Vatican II understanding of the vows or of religious life. 

Then there are the young women in Mexico in initial formation that she writes about. She describes them as having being “woke” to a national political awarenesses and a subsequent new sense of “body” which brought them to speak of their vow of Chastity as “Jesus in our Wombs”. No commentary by the author. 

That kinda did it for me! 

We do need to know more about aging. I have come to know that we Sisters/women need TWO talks about the facts of life: the first one that explained the real facts about sex, dispelling crazy teenage myths like,’ you can’t get pregnant if you have sex standing up’. The second talk would be the real facts of aging, dispelling all the negative myths that we have absorbed since we were toddlers. There are much, much better books and other resources out there about the actual process of aging and all its potential. It would be wonderful to see a few of them in our library.