Carving out a niche in a crowded field is no small accomplishment, yet Anne Arabome’s book on the spiritual exercises does exactly that. Among the myriad biographies of Ignatius and the equally legion glosses on the exercises, Arabome’s book stands out not simply for its explicit feminist retrieval of both Ignatius and his insights into the spiritual life, but for its creative and constructive application of sixteenth-century insights to the complexity of the twenty-first-century world.

Arabome locates this book in an unambiguous commitment to showcase the positive contribution that Ignatius’s work can make to fostering forms of spirituality that can help women to encounter the God of everyday things. In pursuing this goal, Arabome certainly takes issue with aspects of Ignatius’s biography and writing that could appear to be demeaning to women, but she does so without simply dismissing Ignatius. As her alternative to such cancellation, Arabome invites readers to exercises of imagination that foster access to the relationship with God that Ignatius sought to nurture, but she does so while shedding some “baggage” carried by Ignatius as a man of his own time and culture. An aspect of Arabome’s approach to the task of retrieval is her intriguing reconstruction of the women in Ignatius’s life, giving imaginative voice to the various ways in which they stamped his personal history and spiritual growth.

Written primarily for women, the book invites its readers to understand themselves as bearers of imago Dei irrespective of their circumstances in life. For Arabome, it is the uniqueness of God’s action in each person, especially each woman, that is the locus for realizing the “principle and foundation” of the exercises. Arabome draws richly from African cultures to illustrate the capacity of the Ignatian approach to engender hope across cultures. One of the most engaging aspects of the book is Arabome’s use of African proverbs as threads running through each chapter—a personal favorite for this reviewer: “Until the lioness learns to write, the story of the hunt will always glorify the hunter.”

Far from being a book that is simply to be read for information, Arabome’s text invites readers into participation. To this end, the book offers a range of opportunities to enter into activities of prayer or imaginative composition of place as a means to appropriate experientially the ideas that the book is presenting. For this reason, the book is one that could productively be used for prayer groups or as an instrument for initiating catechumens into a significant expression of the church’s traditions of prayer that form ways of being in the world. Taken as an invitation to receive Ignatius and the exercises in a way that opens new windows onto a well-viewed landscape, Why Do You Trouble This Woman? is a work to welcome.