Embodying the Sacred considers the variety and complexity of individual and collective spiritual pathways taken by women religious figures in Lima, Peru. Two theories Van Deusen uses are "sacred materialities" and "gender performance." Sacred Materialities matters a lot in her book. It is a construct of features of physical objects and cultural spaces that are produced, consumed, exchanged, and displayed. Van Deusen acknowledges that women were limited by gender. Feminine expressions of spirituality were not manifested to counter male oppression but spiritual self-transformation on behalf of others.

The book's methods center on female sensorial, linguistic, and relational resonances with the sacred. Part of Van Deusen's argument is as women experienced movements of spiritual transformation, they engaged in the material and immaterial worlds of early modern Catholicism. Feminine knowledge of the sacred was less on formal experience and more on spiritual experience. Heterogeneous diffusion and transformation of key theological points by women facing different issues were part of Catholicism's richness, adaptability, and perseverance.

Van Deusen claims to move beyond stale paradigms that Catholicism was monolithic and oppositional to other religious practices. She wants to broaden the understanding of a range of texts that contain elements of narrativity, surrounding women in Lima. She moves the discussion of piety into the realm of relationality with other women and objects instead of a binary.

Van Deusen is very passionate about her work, as can be seen in her writing style. I was not totally convinced by all of her arguments. I did appreciate the way she looks at women in her study. She says focusing on women's resistance to the patriarchy does not tell the whole story.