Unveiled

What do nuns really think about life, death, love, sex, faith, friendship, guilt, regret, loss, motherhood, feminism, and the modern world and all its conveniences and luxuries? To answer these questions, award-winning journalist Cheryl L. Reed interviewed more than 300 nuns from a wide variety of orders-and with divergent beliefs. She lived with them, observed their daily lives, and participated in silent worship. She witnessed their vow ceremonies, mourned with them, celebrated and...
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What do nuns really think about life, death, love, sex, faith, friendship, guilt, regret, loss, motherhood, feminism, and the modern world and all its conveniences and luxuries? To answer these questions, award-winning journalist Cheryl L. Reed interviewed more than 300 nuns from a wide variety of orders-and with divergent beliefs. She lived with them, observed their daily lives, and participated in silent worship. She witnessed their vow ceremonies, mourned with them, celebrated and drank beer with them. They welcomed questions no one had ever dared ask before. In the end the nuns that Reed approached with suspicion and curiosity ended up teaching her more about motherhood, relationships, and feminism than she ever gleaned from the outside world. In Unveiled, Reed has succeeded in opening up the doors to a once closed world-one often misrepresented and almost always misunderstood-to present nuns not as stoic icons of secrecy and ritual but simply as women who have chosen an independent path, and who now offer themselves as guides to their fascinating, surprising, and enlightening interior lives.