Current Project

Sonia’s recent study Promiscuous Grace: Imagining Beauty and Holiness with Saint Mary of Egypt (Chicago 2023) invites readers to consider the aesthetic, philosophical, and ethical implications of the myriad representations of the life of Saint Mary of Egypt. The story of this saint is richly evocative as it traces her conversion from beautiful, sexually promiscuous girl to her holy, penitent old age as it was mediated by an image of the Virgin Mary. Making use of a mostly Spanish archive spanning medieval poetry, Baroque paintings, and seventeenth-century hagiographic prose and drama, this book proposes that the figurations of this saint in various media ask us to reimagine beauty’s association with longing and loss (the dictum that carnal beauty is ephemeral) in order to think of beauty as accretion where each wrinkle on the saint’s body is a sign of living, loving, and joy and not just a sign of punishment and suffering. Attending to the senses and to joy, it also shows how the holiness that Mary of Egypt’s story spouses is to be found in the quiet of the quotidian as much as in the wondrous sublime. The incarnational aesthetics that emerges from such a reconsideration of beauty and holiness is what Sonia calls promiscuous grace: a freely given religious gift that is also a sensual physical entity attracting and sustaining human attention.