And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy

Stories From the Byways of American Women and Religion

A thoughtful, complex spiritual quest and narrative revisionist history

Written from a female perspective, contextualized within a feminist history of American religious traditions: And Your Daughters Shall Prophesy is an exploration of the American religious experience as reformed and revised by women. And behind the stories of female prophets (well-known and barely known) is Shirk’s own spiritual quest, in the vein of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild or Maggie Rowe’s Sin Bravely, wherein different prophetic figures serve as guideposts.

Women, having spent so much time at the margins of American religious traditions, illuminate its darkened corners.

While the literature on American religions, women, and religious women is vast, the majority of it has been directed at either academic audiences or denominational markets. This book aims toward much broader audiences: taking a literary approach informed by the memoir genre, it incorporates personal experience, field work, and research

Adrian Shirk is a popular columnist for Catapult and a regular contributor to the Atlantic; she is also a radio producer and has strong literary and broadcast connections to leverage for this book