An Enfolding Sequence of Miracles: Jennifer Banks

Our guest, Jennifer Banks, discusses her recent book Natality: Toward a Philosophy of Birth, The book invites us to attend to birth as a challenging and life-affirming reminder of our shared humanity and our capacity for creative renewal.

Birth is one of the most fraught and polarized issues of our time, at the center of debates on abortion, gender, work, and medicine. But birth is not solely an issue; it is a fundamental part of the human condition, and, alongside death, the most consequential event in human life. Yet it remains dramatically unexplored. Although we have long intellectual traditions of wrestling with mortality, few have ever heard of natality, the term political theorist Hannah Arendt used to describe birth's active role in our lives. In this ambitious, revelatory book, Jennifer Banks begins with Arendt's definition of natality as the "miracle that saves the world" to develop an expansive framework for birth's philosophical, political, spiritual, and aesthetic significance.

Jennifer Banks is senior executive editor at Yale University Press. Her work has appeared in the Boston Review and Pleiades, among other publications. She lives in Massachusetts.