Beth Feagan

bell hooks' Spiritual Vision

World Religions

“A sweeping overview of the cultural, political, and religious forces at work prior to and during bell hooks' lifetime, Nittle's book situates hooks' development of a syncretic and hybridized spirituality in concert with her growth into one of the preeminent feminist theorists and writers of our era. Nittle argues that hooks married spirituality and feminism successfully, creating a healing place for herself and blazing trails for the rest of us to follow. Nittle puts hooks' detractors and hooks' writing in conversation, pointing out how her opponents failed to account for the entirety and complexity of her work. It is, at times, delicious. From Beyoncé to Emma Watson, Spike Lee to Thích Nhất Hạnh, this book examines the range of hooks' influence and reach. No one is immune from her consideration, and Nittle argues that everything hooks did and wrote was animated by a fierce commitment to love as action and spirituality as liberation. Refusing to simplify or flatten out hooks' complex body of work, Nittle does justice to the beauty and power of hooks' hard-won belief systems and urges us to engage with hooks' writing in a world increasingly riven by ideological extremism and purposeful misrepresentations of feminist spiritualities. Dialectical, oppositional, accessible, insightful, informative, fascinating, nimble, incisive, and heartening, Nittle's book is both homage and love song.”