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Encountering Traditions
Motherhood: A Confession
A meditation on the conversions, betrayals, and divine revelations of motherhood.
What if Augustine's Confessions had been written not by a man, but by a mother? How might her tales of desire, temptation, and transformation differ from his? In this memoir, Natalie Carnes describes giving birth to a daughter and beginning a story of conversion strikingly unlike Augustine's--even as his journey becomes a surprising companion to her own.
The challenges Carnes recounts will be familiar to many parents. She wonders what and how much she should ask her daughter to suffer in resisting racism, patriarchy, and injustice. She wrestles with an impulse to compel her child to flourish, and reflects on what this desire reveals about human freedom. She negotiates the conflicting demands of a religiously divided home, a working motherhood, and a variety of social expectations, and traces the hopes and anxieties such negotiations expose. The demands of motherhood continually open for her new modes of reflection about deep Christian commitments and age-old human questions.
Addressing first her child and then her God, Carnes narrates how a child she once held within her body grows increasingly separate, provoking painful but generative change. Having given birth, she finds that she herself is reborn.
What if Augustine's Confessions had been written not by a man, but by a mother? How might her tales of desire, temptation, and transformation differ from his? In this memoir, Natalie Carnes describes giving birth to a daughter and beginning a story of conversion strikingly unlike Augustine's--even as his journey becomes a surprising companion to her own.
The challenges Carnes recounts will be familiar to many parents. She wonders what and how much she should ask her daughter to suffer in resisting racism, patriarchy, and injustice. She wrestles with an impulse to compel her child to flourish, and reflects on what this desire reveals about human freedom. She negotiates the conflicting demands of a religiously divided home, a working motherhood, and a variety of social expectations, and traces the hopes and anxieties such negotiations expose. The demands of motherhood continually open for her new modes of reflection about deep Christian commitments and age-old human questions.
Addressing first her child and then her God, Carnes narrates how a child she once held within her body grows increasingly separate, provoking painful but generative change. Having given birth, she finds that she herself is reborn.
195 pages, Kindle Edition
Published April 28, 2020
27 people are currently reading
404 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews
August 24, 2025
Stirring, thought provoking, humble, and insightful. Reading this book right after entering into my own motherhood journey was a deeply moving experience. Carnes beautifully captures the process of carrying a child, and feeling like they are a part of you, to birthing the child, and increasingly feeling their separateness. Through her stream of consciousness, she continually points the reader towards the power of Christ at work in motherhood. Some of her musings will stay with me for a long time to come: What does it mean to shape the will of a child without dominating it? How do you teach your child in a way that allows you to one day learn from them; to become a spiritual child of theirs, yourself? How is the process of becoming a mother like the labor the church endures while waiting for our Lord? Stunning as both a critique of the Confessions and an application of it.
The Lord has given such an extraordinary gift to women. What a power and a privilege it is to receive. Exploring the ways the we bear His image through child rearing turns Paul’s words in 1 Timothy 2:15 from a curse, to a blessing. Praise God for the challenging gift of motherhood! May it make us holy as our Heavenly Father is holy.
The Lord has given such an extraordinary gift to women. What a power and a privilege it is to receive. Exploring the ways the we bear His image through child rearing turns Paul’s words in 1 Timothy 2:15 from a curse, to a blessing. Praise God for the challenging gift of motherhood! May it make us holy as our Heavenly Father is holy.
August 6, 2021
Soul stirring. I am forever changed for the better.
December 29, 2024
This was such a beautiful read, and so theologically thoughtful. It really enriched my own reflections on motherhood.
August 13, 2022
This is a beautifully written book that both my wife and I enjoyed. It’s a re-reading of Augustine’s Confessions with a greater appreciation for creation, specifically the human body.
But explicit critiques are rare and Augustine is not at all the constant center of attention.
The book reads more like a theological meditation on motherhood (with many thoughts applying to parenting more broadly as well), going back and forth between divine-human ways of being and mundane parent-child interactions.
We mostly listened to the audiobook, which we thought was really well done.
But explicit critiques are rare and Augustine is not at all the constant center of attention.
The book reads more like a theological meditation on motherhood (with many thoughts applying to parenting more broadly as well), going back and forth between divine-human ways of being and mundane parent-child interactions.
We mostly listened to the audiobook, which we thought was really well done.
April 12, 2023
This is one of the most beautiful books I have ever read. While I am not a mother yet, I was drawn in and captivated by Natalie’s revelations of Christ and God through pregnancy, birth, and her daughter. Her confessions read similarly to Augustine’s confessions, as she studied him in her greater education. She draws on some similar themes as Augustine, quoting him throughout, while using her own very personal experiences. She doesn’t shy away from her own humanness as a mom, showcasing her moments of inadequacy as a mother that ultimately turn her daughter towards her Heavenly Father.
I am not Catholic as Natalie is, so there are some moments that I didn’t fully align with but overall the depth of writing and confessions she lays before the reader are magnificent.
I am not Catholic as Natalie is, so there are some moments that I didn’t fully align with but overall the depth of writing and confessions she lays before the reader are magnificent.
April 15, 2023
Wow! This was wonderful. I read this with my wife after a friend recommended it to us. I can’t recommend this enough. Dr. Carnes does a beautiful job of both pulling from, and adding to the good of “Confessions” by Augustine contextualizing it for her own journey as a mother in modern America.
There is so much I could say about the specifics of this book, but to avoid spoilers I’ll leave it at this. Read this book and glean from the beauty of seeing Christ through our everyday life, especially our embodied experiences. For Dr. Carnes, that is in her experience of motherhood.
There is so much I could say about the specifics of this book, but to avoid spoilers I’ll leave it at this. Read this book and glean from the beauty of seeing Christ through our everyday life, especially our embodied experiences. For Dr. Carnes, that is in her experience of motherhood.
November 19, 2021
An excellent book that I will surely return to again and again. Dr. Carnes writes vulnerably and openly about her own personal experiences as both a mother to her children and a child of God herself. Her writing is engaging and thought-provoking and even moved me (and my husband) to tears at several points. Highly recommend this book to anyone looking to further examine their own identity as parent or child.
May 31, 2020
This is the book I have been hungry for since becoming a mother eight years ago. I find my voice in it. Thoughts I have had about birth and creation, and soul-wrestlings I have handled like mercy and domination are all translated upwards for me by Carnes in a beautiful meditative engagement of Augustine. This is a book men should read, and through it know God more truly.
December 10, 2023
I love this book.
January 7, 2024
Beautiful.
June 3, 2023
This deserves a bump to 4.5/5 because of how much I’ve reflected on her words since my initial reading.
“The gift of your needy presence taught me to receive you, my own vulnerable stranger, so that by that practice of hospitality, I might learn to receive Christ. With you pressing against the walls of my belly, finding no room to grow, I learned to make space for God. And so through you, my small creation, I found and became more like my uncontainable Creator. In your dependent existence, God came to me in a new way.”
“The gift of your needy presence taught me to receive you, my own vulnerable stranger, so that by that practice of hospitality, I might learn to receive Christ. With you pressing against the walls of my belly, finding no room to grow, I learned to make space for God. And so through you, my small creation, I found and became more like my uncontainable Creator. In your dependent existence, God came to me in a new way.”
August 1, 2024
My husband is the one who first read this book years ago. When I got pregnant, it was the first book he recommended we read together to prepare for parenthood. Although I was the one pregnant with our first child, a daughter, I somehow couldn't bring myself to crack it open.
Motherhood is incredibly complex, and the feelings around it can vary in a spectrum so large it could encompass the whole imagination. I am glad I was finally convinced to read this book, over halfway through my pregnancy, because it enters into the conversation with the confidence of a grown woman and the curiosity of a girl. I was afraid I'd be faced with the endless cliches of Christian motherhood--It is one of the reasons I have avoided any literature on motherhood this long--but I was faced instead with a truly insightful, spiritually challenging, and deeply encouraging "Confession" that will surely stay with me and my daughter for the rest of our lives. I cannot recommend it enough! Even to people who are not parents.
Motherhood is incredibly complex, and the feelings around it can vary in a spectrum so large it could encompass the whole imagination. I am glad I was finally convinced to read this book, over halfway through my pregnancy, because it enters into the conversation with the confidence of a grown woman and the curiosity of a girl. I was afraid I'd be faced with the endless cliches of Christian motherhood--It is one of the reasons I have avoided any literature on motherhood this long--but I was faced instead with a truly insightful, spiritually challenging, and deeply encouraging "Confession" that will surely stay with me and my daughter for the rest of our lives. I cannot recommend it enough! Even to people who are not parents.
November 26, 2021
Thought-provoking. Carnes does a nice job of demonstrating how the experience of parenting deepens her understanding of God. That’s certainly something every parent, both mothers and fathers, can relate to.
It’s obvious, even awkward at times that Carnes is doing everything possible to avoid referring to God with male pronouns. This is not always possible, since one of God’s primary titles is Father. Carnes ultimately connects her experience of motherhood to understanding God as Mother, a title she gives him in the book.
While I don’t have any issue with celebrating the mothering qualities of God, I confess that I don’t understand the motivation to eliminate as many of his fathering qualities as possible. God chose to reveal himself to humankind as Father. I don’t know why that’s offensive. We recognize others by their preferred pronouns, but don’t give God the same courtesy.
It’s obvious, even awkward at times that Carnes is doing everything possible to avoid referring to God with male pronouns. This is not always possible, since one of God’s primary titles is Father. Carnes ultimately connects her experience of motherhood to understanding God as Mother, a title she gives him in the book.
While I don’t have any issue with celebrating the mothering qualities of God, I confess that I don’t understand the motivation to eliminate as many of his fathering qualities as possible. God chose to reveal himself to humankind as Father. I don’t know why that’s offensive. We recognize others by their preferred pronouns, but don’t give God the same courtesy.
June 5, 2021
I am not, nor will I ever be a mother. However, I picked this book up after reading Carnes's work on Beauty and thought it would be an interesting book to read with my own mother. After reading Confessions of St. Augustine this spring semester, I was delighted to find a book not just pertinent to Motherhood, but to the Christian life. Dr. Carnes's insights would benefit preacher and professor, laymen, and mothers alike. Her work shows that to be a Christian, we must take on the life of the mother of God. In a world that is constantly demeaning motherhood, Carnes reminds us the dignity and beauty of this most high and holy calling.
April 23, 2024
As I read this book, the one word that kept coming to my mind was "astonishing". Because this book truly is astonishing in its breadth and beauty. As a man who is about to become the father to his first child, this was such a powerful meditation on how God shows up in the process of pregnancy, birth, and raising a child.
Carnes is a theologian whose writing and research focuses on theological aesthetics and Christian iconography, and her immersion in beauty itself is evident in her way of looking at the world and writing about it. She is so attuned to the world around and within her, as well as the spaces between her and her daughter, that it yields breathtaking insights into God's revelation in and through us.
The book is inspired by and structured like Augustine's "Confessions'. It's written in second person to both her daughter and to God. The book covers her pregnancy into the early childhood of her daughter, and each chapter has a topic for reflection that she turns like a diamond in the light to reveal its facets, reflections, and refractions.
In the course of doing so, she offers some of the most profound and illuminating meditations on God, women's bodies, and the ways that childhood shows us God.
For example, in the first chapter Carnes is speaking to her unborn child, reflecting that, in a way, she is her child's first image of God: the one in whom she moves and lives and has her being, the one whom her daughter knows only as an occasional hazy muffled voice, the one her daughter cannot see and yet is the one without whom her daughter would cease to exist. Likewise, her daughter is an image of God to the mother: where in the early days of pregnancy, the mother has very little to go on to prove the existence of this being, and yet it is one that is slowly forming and shaping who this woman is in the deepest ways that she cannot control nor manufacture.
Other reflections that will stick with me surround topics like the sacraments and children's insatiable desire for play and exploration and what that teaches us about the Creator God. And how, in a sense, all of us parents become our children's children in some sense as we see them as separate beings in and of themselves with lessons to teach us, and how that great exchange points us all the more deeply to Christ.
It's also astonishing how this book avoids the pitfalls of other similar books—concerns which likely would keep away many perspective readers that would otherwise benefit greatly.This isn't the caricature of a hippie crunchy mommy book that plays fast and loose with the Bible and theology to hammer home their new age ideas. This is a theologically rich book, immersed in church history and historic orthodox Christian faith, with a deep reverence for God's revelation in scripture and the world. There is a deep humility in the almost childlike curiosity and openness with which Carnes receives the world and offers her insights.
I listened to the audiobook edition of this book, and I also want to give a shout out to the narrator, Rebecca Zimmerman. This is a deep book, and that can lend itself to some very difficult narration, as it requires very specific inflections to communicate the complex sentence. Zimmerman is fantastic in this regard and I would highly commend the audiobook to you.
If you can't tell, I adore this book. I cried so many times through it, and paused it often just to sit with and chew on some of the ideas. I encourage all of you to read it and sit under its beauty. And may give you no eyes to see yourself, your body, and the children in your care, both physical and spiritual.
Carnes is a theologian whose writing and research focuses on theological aesthetics and Christian iconography, and her immersion in beauty itself is evident in her way of looking at the world and writing about it. She is so attuned to the world around and within her, as well as the spaces between her and her daughter, that it yields breathtaking insights into God's revelation in and through us.
The book is inspired by and structured like Augustine's "Confessions'. It's written in second person to both her daughter and to God. The book covers her pregnancy into the early childhood of her daughter, and each chapter has a topic for reflection that she turns like a diamond in the light to reveal its facets, reflections, and refractions.
In the course of doing so, she offers some of the most profound and illuminating meditations on God, women's bodies, and the ways that childhood shows us God.
For example, in the first chapter Carnes is speaking to her unborn child, reflecting that, in a way, she is her child's first image of God: the one in whom she moves and lives and has her being, the one whom her daughter knows only as an occasional hazy muffled voice, the one her daughter cannot see and yet is the one without whom her daughter would cease to exist. Likewise, her daughter is an image of God to the mother: where in the early days of pregnancy, the mother has very little to go on to prove the existence of this being, and yet it is one that is slowly forming and shaping who this woman is in the deepest ways that she cannot control nor manufacture.
Other reflections that will stick with me surround topics like the sacraments and children's insatiable desire for play and exploration and what that teaches us about the Creator God. And how, in a sense, all of us parents become our children's children in some sense as we see them as separate beings in and of themselves with lessons to teach us, and how that great exchange points us all the more deeply to Christ.
It's also astonishing how this book avoids the pitfalls of other similar books—concerns which likely would keep away many perspective readers that would otherwise benefit greatly.This isn't the caricature of a hippie crunchy mommy book that plays fast and loose with the Bible and theology to hammer home their new age ideas. This is a theologically rich book, immersed in church history and historic orthodox Christian faith, with a deep reverence for God's revelation in scripture and the world. There is a deep humility in the almost childlike curiosity and openness with which Carnes receives the world and offers her insights.
I listened to the audiobook edition of this book, and I also want to give a shout out to the narrator, Rebecca Zimmerman. This is a deep book, and that can lend itself to some very difficult narration, as it requires very specific inflections to communicate the complex sentence. Zimmerman is fantastic in this regard and I would highly commend the audiobook to you.
If you can't tell, I adore this book. I cried so many times through it, and paused it often just to sit with and chew on some of the ideas. I encourage all of you to read it and sit under its beauty. And may give you no eyes to see yourself, your body, and the children in your care, both physical and spiritual.
August 23, 2023
Natalie Carnes was my professor, and her class holds a very special place in my heart. Reading Augustine’s Confessions in her class was illuminating for me, so I had high expectations for this book, and they were surpassed. It’s a beautiful story about her daughter told through the form of Confessions. She weaves church history, the life of faith, and becoming a mother together so wonderfully. I think it might be my favorite book I’ve read this year.
October 15, 2020
Brilliant merger of the deeply material experience of motherhood with the transcendent knowledge of God as Parent.
December 5, 2020
This is brilliant and beautiful, both as a critically constructive meditation on Augustine's Confessions, and as an eminently readable account of parenthood and Christian life. Book of the year?
April 1, 2022
Thoughtful. Thought provoking!
February 4, 2023
Stunning.
August 3, 2025
Amazing. So good that I read it straight through in one day. A thought provoking and prayer provoking reinterpretation of Confessions.
January 29, 2026
introspective and thought provoking. worth rereading regularly!
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews