Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity
Digital Logos Edition
Overview
How we talk about human life matters.
In western post-Christian society, humans are thought of less like precious image bearers and more like commodities. The canary in the coal mine of this ideological shift is often women and children, which manifests itself in the seemingly built-in disdain towards motherhood and children for their lack of production of economically valuable goods.
However, the risk of this utilitarian approach to human life is not just outside the church, but within those spaces as well. Indeed, the commodification of human life within the contemporary body politic is so deeply embedded within the systems, even the church has lost touch with some of the ways it inherently devalues the lives of women and children.
Classics scholar Nadya Williams draws from voices both ancient and modern to illuminate how Christians can value human life amidst an empire that seeks to dehumanize that which is most precious. Bringing insights from the beliefs and practices of the early church in Greco-Roman context about motherhood, raising children, and human life, Williams suggests there is a way to recapture a vision that affirms the imago Dei in each person over and above our economic contribution to society.
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- Draws from voices both ancient and modern.
- Illuminates how Christians can value human life amidst an empire that seeks to dehumanize.
- Suggests there is a way to recapture a vision that affirms the imago Dei in each person.
- Acknowledgments
- 1. Introduction
- Part 1: Symptoms of Disease
- 2. Devaluing Pregnancy, Childbearing, and the Maternal Body
- 3. Your Assembly-Line Life
- 4. Motherhood and Creative Work; Motherhood Versus Creative Work
- Part 2: Views of Personhood in the Ancient Mediterranean Before and After Christianity
- 5. Worthless: The Devaluing of Women, Children, and Human Beings in the Pre-Christian Mediterranean
- 6. The Useless Ones: Devaluing Civilians in War and Peace
- 7. The Redemption of Useless People
- Part 3: Speaking Life into a Culture of Death
- 8. Consolation for the Weary Sufferer
- 9. Seeking the City of God
- 10. In Pursuit of Human Flourishing
- Conclusion: Who Is My Neighbor? Treasuring Children, Mothers, and All Image Bearers
- General Index
In this moving, pastoral book, Nadya Williams plumbs the long history of assumptions and practices that culminate in what Pope Francis has termed our ‘throwaway’ culture. In the same way that the early Christian church dismantled the Roman Empire’s commodification of human persons, so the gospel continues to bear witness to the intrinsic value of all humans, even those society deems useless. Williams wears her considerable learning lightly, and readers will find her narrative brings both illumination and conviction.
—Jeffrey Bilbro, associate professor of English at Grove City College and editor-in-chief at Front Porch Republic
Nadya Williams has the great ability to bring together good history and contemporary application without being cheesy or ignoring nuance. In this volume, she ably helps us see how both a Judeo-Christian account of the imago Dei and the gospel’s call to radical and sacrificial love were revolutionary in the ancient Greco-Roman world, and how these two realities remain revolutionary in our own dehumanizing world. Read Williams not simply to learn about the past but to be inspired for the present!
—Kelly M. Kapic, professor of theological studies at Covenant College and author of You’re Only Human
Parents tempted to optimize every aspect of children’s experiences, beware. Those very efforts may make us complicit in devaluing human life, especially of mothers and children. Nadya Williams warns that few Americans are exempt from cultural imperatives assigning a price to everything—even human beings. The author’s deep knowledge of history and poetry of the pre-Christian Roman world makes her a perceptive guide through its brutalities too, some of which bear disturbing likeness to our own. Then Jesus came, and the soul felt its worth: the author reminds us that the gospel recognizes every soul as precious. Williams bids readers to transform pro-life concerns into commitment to full human flourishing.
—Agnes Howard, author of Showing: What Pregnancy Tells Us About Being Human
- Title: Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic: Ancient Christianity and the Recovery of Human Dignity
- Author: Nadya Williams
- Publisher: IVP Academic
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Logos Release Date: 2025
- Pages: 224
- Era: era:contemporary
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Logos Reader Edition
- Subjects: Motherhood › Religious aspects--Christianity; Child rearing › Religious aspects--Christianity; Human beings › Religious aspects--Christianity; Image of God
- ISBNs: 9781514009130, 9781514009123, 1514009137, 1514009129
- Resource ID: LLS:MTHRSCHLDRDGNTY
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2025-10-20T21:12:56Z
Nadya Williams (PhD, Classics and Program in the Ancient World, Princeton University) is a military historian of the Greco-Roman world and the co-editor of Civilians and Warfare in World History. She is Book Review Editor at Current, where she also edits The Arena blog. She is a regular contributor to the Anxious Bench, and has also written for Plough, Front Porch Republic, Church Life Journal, History Today Magazine, History News Network, and The Conversation.