[Book Review: Fertile Ground: A Pilgrimage through Pregnancy] God came into the world not in the blink of an eye, but in and through his mother’s womb through the process of pregnancy, labor, and delivery.”
Agnes R. Howard
It may seem too obvious to be worth saying that pregnancy is a curious spiritual status: the condition of having two (or more) bodies, brains, and eternal souls in a space usually occupied by one. Just so, we might imagine that the best theological minds of the ages would have bent their exertions to puzzling this through. Instead, it turns out that wise treatment of this experience has been wanting until recently in current culture high and low, but also, disappointingly, in the theology and scholarship of the past. We have much to celebrate, then, in the nearly simultaneous arrival of two thoughtful books considering pregnancy from an Eastern Orthodox perspective.