Feminist Prayers for My Daughter: Powerful Petitions for Every Stage of Her Life

By Shannon K. Evans

Spiritual language is often male-focused, overlooking the uniquely female experience. Author Shannon K. Evans believes our daughters deserve better.

Evans wrote Feminist Prayers for My Daughter as a gift to mothers and women everywhere. It offers short prayers that affirm the unique challenges and embrace the natural abilities embodied by our daughters, young and old alike. Categories of prayers include embodiment, relationships, wholeness, justice, equality, and milestones. This book encompasses all of life from birth to death while imagining God in ways that resonate with the feminine experience.

For mothers, grandmothers, mentors, and beyond, this prayer book provides a poignant and powerful path to both encounter God personally and seek the well-being of the daughters in our lives. It gives words to a mother's desires for her daughter in the modern world and breathes hope for a church that will give her equal power.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
• Release date: Mar 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781493440351

Book preview

I pray my daughter has the freedom to live however God has made her, and Shannon Evans gifts us with the theologically rich and beautifully crafted words for that prayer. Drawing from the deep wisdom of Christian tradition, she reminds us that—even if we cannot protect our daughters from the hard choices ahead or the grief that is sure to come—we can do what mothers have always done and pray them through it.

—Beth Allison Barr, professor, Baylor University; bestselling author of The Making of Biblical Womanhood

Shannon Evans has written a beautiful book of feminist prayers that are full of care, authenticity, and nuance—clear and gentle guidance for parents and children alike. The words and images in these pages will be a balm for many, reminding us that Sacred Mystery is always beckoning us home.

—Kaitlin B. Curtice, bestselling author of Native and Living Resistance

"Feminist Prayers for My Daughter is like coming into a harbor of hope. I have longed for a creative, robust voice like that of Shannon Evans. The prayers in this book are a treasure. Evans’s approach to divinity as lived in daily life will inspire and encourage women, both young and old, to pray and live as their freest, truest, and wisest selves."

—Joyce Rupp, author of Prayers to Sophia and The Star in My Heart

So much of mothering a daughter is wordless: an embodied longing for a world in which she is fully connected to herself and others, a heartache knowing she will face pain, an uncontainable awe at the delight of who she is becoming, a bow of the head to Mother God to show us both the way. Evans offers us words where there often aren’t any. She shows us how and what to pray for our daughters, because when our daughters are treasured, free to live their lives fully, it is better for us all.

—Hillary L. McBride, psychologist, author, speaker, and podcaster

"The words in Feminist Prayers for My Daughter are rooted in the sacred and divine. Exquisitely woven, they took me through my own journey as daughter, mother, woman, and healer. May we all read these words to remind us of our inherent worth and beauty, and may they nourish the flames of the feminine rising. This book is revolutionary for these times. I cannot recommend it enough."

—Asha Frost, Indigenous healer; bestselling author of You Are the Medicine

Also by Shannon K. Evans

Rewilding Motherhood: Your Path to an Empowered Feminine Spirituality

Embracing Weakness: The Unlikely Secret to Changing the World

Luminous: A 30-Day Journal for Accepting Your Body, Honoring Your Soul, and Finding Your Joy

© 2023 by Shannon K. Evans

Published by Brazos Press

a division of Baker Publishing Group

Grand Rapids, Michigan

www.brazospress.com

Ebook edition created 2023

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—for example, electronic, photocopy, recording—without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

ISBN 978-1-4934-4035-1

The author is represented by WordServe Literary Group, www.wordserveliterary.com.

Illustrations © Rosanna Tasker / IllustrationX, IllustrationX.com

Baker Publishing Group publications use paper produced from sustainable forestry practices and post-consumer waste whenever possible.

For my parents,

who have prayed some iteration of

these prayers every day of my life

And, of course,

for Thea Moon

Contents

Endorsements    1

Half Title Page    3

Also by Shannon K. Evans    4

Title Page    5

Copyright Page    6

Dedication    7

Preface    15

Relationships    19

for supportive female friendships    21

for daughterhood    23

for handling peer pressure    25

for her broken heart    27

for commitment    28

for consensual sex    30

for becoming a mother    31

for singleness    32

for rewilding motherhood    34

for a shame-free sexual ethic    36

Embodiment    39

for body acceptance    41

for seeing color    43

for when gender boxes are too small    45

for disabilities    47

for aging    49

for celebrating breasts    51

for getting her hands dirty    52

for dynamic movement    54

for pregnancy    55

for miscarriage and infant loss    57

Spirituality    59

for an inner compass    61

for a lost sheep    63

for sacred listening    65

for a faith community    67

for embodied knowing    69

for seeing women lead in church    70

for curiosity    72

for the heart of a mystic    73

for an unquenched flame    75

for freedom    77

Womanhood    79

for making room for all    81

for a world without photoshop    83

for renewed language about womanhood    85

for the women who came before    87

for the women who will come after    89

for intersectional justice    91

for a feminine imaging of God    93

for taking up space    95

for vocational choice    97

for honoring mother earth    99

Wholeness    101

for trying and failing    103

for getting