Public Books Examines Why Nuns Have Become Culture’s New Moral and Aesthetic Obsession

Public Books has published a wide-ranging essay on the growing cultural appeal of nuns, placing two recent works at the center of the trend: Rosalía’s new album *Lux* and Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita’s *Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First-Century Life*. The article treats both as signs of a broader moment in which religious women, especially cloistered ones, have become unexpectedly visible again in music, publishing, and online culture.

The essay notes that Rosalía released *Lux* on November 7, 2025, and that critics quickly praised its mix of languages, orchestral arrangement, and references to religious longing. The album draws on figures such as Rabia Al Adawiyya, Hildegard of Bingen, and Rose of Lima, while pairing sacred imagery with intimate, bodily language. Public Books reads that release alongside *Convent Wisdom*, a book that promises lessons on love, work, money, body, soul, fame, and “girlfriends” by looking back to sixteenth-century nuns.

At the heart of the essay is a question about whether this fascination is genuinely clarifying or merely another turn in the culture industry’s appetite for novelty. The author argues that nuns are now appearing everywhere: on designer runways, in streaming media, in horror films, in historical dramas, and in a reported rise in young women seeking religious orders. Yet the piece insists that turning devout women into a fashionable aesthetic is different from treating them as possible guides to modern life.

Much of the article is devoted to Garriga and Urbita’s podcast *Las Hijas de Felipe*, which built a following before the book appeared. The podcast takes its name from Philip II and uses the Spanish pronoun *vosotras* to signal a space made by and for women. Public Books praises the project for shifting attention away from the masculine canon of Spain’s so-called Golden Age and toward the lives and writings of women in convents.

The essay emphasizes that the convents of the Baroque era were not sealed-off worlds. According to the article, nuns took part in theater, festivals, the making and selling of goods, natural philosophy, scientific experimentation, and correspondence. It also points to women such as Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz and Teresa of Ávila, describing them as figures who were active, networked, and sometimes far from the stereotypes attached to enclosed religious life.

In *Convent Wisdom*, Garriga and Urbita are said to extend that mix of scholarship and wit into print, though with a deliberately comic touch. The Public Books review highlights the book’s analogies between modern culture and monastic life, including comparisons that link levitation to exercise routines and mystical ecstasy to pop performance. At the same time, the authors are described as offering serious reflections on work, collaboration, and the pressures of graduate study, often drawing on their own experience at Brown University.

The larger literary and historical point, the essay suggests, is that early modern nuns were never simply about retreat from the world. Their writing and practices were tied to questions of survival under religious, governmental, and social pressure, and their self-examination aimed at union with God rather than self-optimization. That distinction matters in the article’s closing concern: today’s enthusiasm for “convent wisdom” may reveal as much about modern individualism as about the women it celebrates. The piece leaves open whether the current nun revival can move beyond aesthetics and self-help to something closer to the spiritual or political seriousness that once sustained these lives.