Synopses & Reviews
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.
Review
Synopsis
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? A candid, fascinating, and revealing look at life in (and out of) the convent--by an award-winning investigative journalist.
Synopsis
Surprising. Provocative. Honest. For Unveiled, reporter Cheryl Reed interviewed more than 300 nuns of diverse beliefs, lifestyles, and orders. She lived and prayed with them, witnessed their vows, mourned and celebrated with them, and asked questions no one had ever dared before: about love and sex, life and death, faith and joy, and loss and regret. In the process, Reed would discover more about motherhood, relationships, faith, and feminism than she ever gleaned from the outside world.
About the Author
Cheryl L. Reed's articles have appeared in Time, U.S. News and World Report, Philadelphia Inquirer Magazine, Salon.com, and the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, among others. She is the recipient of the Harvard University Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting and the Edgar Allen Poe Award from the White House Correspondent Association. She is currently a visiting professor at the University of St. Thomas.