"This book is vivid, original and compelling . It makes a profound contribution to theology through its artistic testimony to encounters with the divine in the depths of motherly experience. It is also exemplifies the potential of new and emerging methodologies in theological reflection which employ creative practice to generate insights that are not representable through more conventional, propositional forms."
As though being taken for a long walk on the shore towards it, Motherly ethically imagines and invites us towards a “new cultural horizon”. Artist-scholar Rebekah Pryor writes as “the woman in the mother”. Her humble work and (after Irigaray) “loving thought” that persistently reaches-searches “our creative capacity for autonomy and reflexivity” caresses... Repeated ‘patterns’ pasted and paced, joining domestic and public, and interior and architectural, trace Pryor's ’gestures’ that call for our faculty and love for different others.
Motherly achieves a critical and skilfully woven creative, theological, and personal reflection that engages everyday life with wide-ranging philosophical and theological claims. Using narrative, visual art, performance, installation, and videography, the work offers a historic scope that draws upon the insights of the early church, medieval mystics, First Nations, and contemporary global exchanges. For scholars of Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva, the argument and application of sexuate difference theory and semiotic chora is stunningly nuanced and cogent. The embodied and materially situated analysis is palpably accessible and Motherly achieves a multimodal and multidisciplinary investigation that will resonate with students and researchers. "
