Feminist and womanist theologians continually negotiate their ambivalence (Bednarowski Reference Bednarowski1999) about patriarchal/kyriarchal religious traditions and societies by engaging in a rich multi-step transdisciplinary theological method of critique/suspicion, recovery/retrieval and reconstruction of more just persons and worlds in religion and society (e.g., Elizabeth Johnson, Ada María Isasi-Díaz and M. Shawn Copeland). Natalie Carnes similarly addresses such feminist and womanist conundrums with Christianity and interweaves theological, philosophical, scientific, literary and artistic studies to elaborate on attunement and its key practices of aesthetics, affordance and repair, thereby participating in and offering a new take on this method in women’s liberation theologies. As Carnes argues, attunement enables feminist and womanist theologians ‘to discover more fertile soil, to inhabit freer terrain, to move within a more hospitable environment’ (p. xiv). Nonetheless, Carnes affirms feminist and womanist theological rejection of what she terms inhospitable, sick or, in my view, toxic theological environments. Migration to more generative spaces and sources may be needed.

Creatively combining multiple disciplines to articulate this method, Carnes defines attunement as ‘an aesthetically invested and constructively oriented mode of reading and writing….[that] draw[s] on the affordances of a text or artifact to build new, positive affordances into the text….changing what the text means for a given community and transforming the text environment to be more conducive to…flourishing’ (p. xv). Outlined in chapter 1, attunement ‘constellates’ (Carnes’ own contribution) multiple sources, such as ‘texts, artifacts, and art objects around a text to let it speak anew’ (xix). Carnes engages deeply ‘problematic and powerful texts such as Augustine’s Confessions’ (p. 3) as an exemplary case to apply this method. While Augustine’s conversion trades on and reinforces patriarchal hierarchical dualisms that overly associate women with bodiliness, sexuality and sin, a reparative reading in Carnes’ view shows our damaged and healed relations. This way of reading Augustine lifts up for Carnes our existential anxieties and errors in giving and receiving gifts of love and life, still refracted by women’s bodies – not as sinful but as ‘sacred places’ and ‘good and powerful sign[s] of the divine’ (pp. 20, 22). Using this attuned reading, women’s bodies are recentred to construct an embodied theology of God – God creates or mothers, and we co-create or mother others. As Carnes concludes, ‘the God who creates us invites us into the work of recreation’ (p. 23).

Aesthetics – experiences, stories, symbols and the arts – play a central role in feminist and womanist theologies, communicating their alternative, more just worldviews and ways of life. Carnes’ method of attunement likewise forefronts aesthetics for these reasons. More than a significant survey of early, medieval and modern women in Christianity, Carnes attends in chapter 2 to objects, forms and sources in women’s religio-cultural production and in feminist and womanist theologies as aesthetical ways for women and gender-marginalised peoples to reclaim their full humanity, agency and authority. Visionary narratives, dialogues and ecological imagery not only relay medieval European women mystics’ divine encounters and views of divine-human relations but also provide aesthetical avenues for women’s theological voices. The body figures prominently in medieval European women’s works, in feminist histories of Christianity and in contemporary womanist theologies, as women engage an aesthetical turn to portray their theological imaginaries and ethics.

Applying ecopsychology and literary studies to feminist and womanist theology in chapter 3, affordances for Carnes foster feminist and womanist theological flourishing amid damaged and damaging patriarchal religio-social systems. Affordances create the conditions for reinterpreting and remaking inherited religious traditions (e.g., texts, doctrines, beliefs and practices) toward better possible futures. Recapitulating key insights from chapter 2, different forms that theology takes across different contexts – texts, images, objects and performances – open up or generate new transformative possibilities for feminist and womanist theo-political imagination and action. Affordances and their life-giving work emerge in varied spaces and places (that exceed Carnes’ literary-based framework in this chapter) – theatre as historical and political transformation of women’s theological work, symbols in solidarity movements and theological classrooms, as well as interdisciplinary environmental justice programmes.

In chapter 4, Carnes foregrounds repair to further illuminate the inextricable links between aesthetics and politics. Carnes frequently repeats attunement’s axiom of mutual repair throughout the book: ‘The text repairs me and I also repair the text’ (p. 17) or ‘I repair the text; the text repairs me’ (pp. 21, 115) or ‘We repair; we are repaired’ (p. 133). Yet contrary to this mantra, repair extends beyond texts and individual persons to incorporate multiple types of aesthetics and also reshapes communities and societies. For example, Carnes takes Marian images, especially the contemporary icon Our Lady Mother of Ferguson, to highlight multiple injustices and possibilities of theo-political repair. Abstracted from real women’s histories and experiences, Marian images are ideologically weaponised to support elite women’s race, gender, class and sexual privilege, on the one hand, and to subordinate or erase most women of colour, on the other hand. By contrast, Carnes situates this icon within the Black Lives Matter movement and within the role of Mary as Mediatrix – refracting the divine and the human condition – to spotlight both anti-Black racist violence and the human vocation to realise liberation and hope, ‘to become co-laborers with Mary in her work of birthing Christ’ by practising Magnificat-based solidarity for a more just socio-political order (p. 119). ‘To claim solidarity with all humankind is to enter into a Marian imitation of God’s own maternal relation to creation and, in such solidarity, to find our own Marian vocation to love the neighbor’ (p. 129).

Taken together, attunement and its associated practices of aesthetics, affordance and repair constitute, on my reading, a feminist pneumatological and eschatological task. In Carnes’ words, ‘to seek the Spirit’s [transformative] work in history and to be en-Spirited for such work in the present catch[es] glimpses of the kingdom that we pray will come’ (p. 83). Such a Spirit-infused eschatological project offers much-needed hope for future feminist and womanist theological critical and constructive contributions to our world in politically tumultuous and tragic times.