overview
Blessed Are These Hands
From a nurse’s hands cradling a newborn with its innocent gaze to the eighty-year-old holding an austere egg, 
Blessed Are These Hands celebrates the extraordinary spirit of ordinary women.
Blessed Are These Hands shows photographs and tells stories of American women from infancy to 80, each holding something that represents her deepest values. These photos, with their commentary, create an inspirational photographic essay that speaks about the evocative images from each woman’s viewpoint. The book chronicles the breadth of American women’s spirituality today.
Blessed Are These Hands reveals overt and subtle objects that today’s women holdsacred. Religious symbols like a Hindu kalash, a Jewish star, an Egyptian ankh, and rosary beads have their place in women’s hearts and hands, of course.
Yet women make commonplace objects sacred too: a feather, a guitar, car keys, seed packets, books, and breasts. Monica holds her favorite hammer and notes, “In my relationship with myself and others, I’ve come to know that using the simplest of tools works well.” Theresa cradles rice because, as she explains, “you can’t be Filipino without rice being around you your whole life. So I hold rice in my hands in honor of . . . 
my paternal grandparents who were rice farmers.”
The women featured represent a cross-section of America—no matter their race, age, religion, sexual orientation, or occupation, these women make clear what they hold sacred. The book reaches far beyond America’s widely varied religious base. It illustrates women’s spiritual views and practices that center on nature, art, work, hobbies, family bonds, as well as religion.
The photographs capture only women’s hands. In these portraits, the hands give all the clues about the woman’s identity. Hands often mask race, frequently conceal age, and rarely reveal class or sexual orientation. Portraits without faces, body types, and other clues allow readers to more easily recognize other women they know in their own lives–and themselves. A visitor to the book’s online photo gallery commented, “I am amazed that hands can tell us so much about people.”
Please explore the site to learn more about Blessed Are These Hands. We welcome inquiries from publishers and literary agents about this project.
-Susan Kullmann & Marvelle Thompson
