Convent Wisdom: How Sixteenth-Century Nuns Could Save Your Twenty-First Century Life
Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita
Avid Reader Press
Published November 4, 2025
Do you ever wonder what advice a nun from 1586 might offer about your latest romantic dilemma? Or how she might counsel you when your boss won’t stop “reply-all”—ing to your emails? And what would she say about your doomscrolling habit?
If you’ve answered yes, you’re not alone: Ana Garriga and Carmen Urbita wonder, too. In Convent Wisdom, Garriga and Urbita weave together the stories of nuns (mainly of the 16th-century Spanish variety), and modern-day quandaries like the dynamics of female friendship, work-life balance, and body image issues, with their own story as Ph.D. students/best friends/hosts of “Las hijas de Felipe,” a popular Spanish-language podcast on this topic. These disparate spheres come together in a witty, dramatic and humorous look at the lives of nuns (with their ecstatic visions of Christ, their fasts, their co-dependent relationships with their sisters) and our own lives (the newest fad diet, toxic relationships and anguish about the world). Despite the obvious differences between a 2025 millennial and a Discalced Carmelite nun in 1570, the book humorously declares that the nuns have as much to teach us as the latest self-help book.
(Nuns) enter religious orders for varied reasons, experience robust spiritual lives, encounter personality conflicts with their superiors, stress about money, and more. Their challenges and joys are as real as ours, which makes their tongue-in-cheek advice quite compelling!
Garriga and Urbita are historians who include detailed accounts of the nuns’ lives. But their careful attention to historicity does not make for dry storytelling. These nuns are fully-fleshed out humans who experience the full range of emotions and experiences, contrary to popular stereotypes. They enter religious orders for varied reasons, experience robust spiritual lives, encounter personality conflicts with their superiors, stress about money, and more. Their challenges and joys are as real as ours, which makes their tongue-in-cheek advice quite compelling!
As someone with only surface knowledge of the topic, I initially struggled to keep straight the numerous historical figures and orders of nuns (though the authors do provide a handy character guide). Likewise, the authors’ knowledge of internet culture is immense; they whip out trends from years past, drop slang that even I, a chronically online millennial, had to look up. It could be easy to get lost in 16th- or 21st-century minutiae, but when I stopped fretting over the names and details, I found that the book’s quick pace painted two vibrant worlds as they playfully intersected on the page.
The internet slang is funny, the nuns’ stories are engaging, but perhaps the most profound story is that of the friendship between the two authors. Garriga and Urbita met as Ph.D. students, and over the years, have supported each other through the grueling pace of academia, determining professional ambitions, navigating relationships, and all the other things that accompany being a 20- or 30-something. They argue that when life proves difficult, we can find solidarity and solace in the stories of nuns. Yet they also show that life, whether lived in a convent or in grad-school housing, requires sisters (or brothers or siblings) who will walk through it with you. In the end, if the nuns don’t have the answer, Garriga and Urbita do; their example proves that perhaps friends and community can help just as much.
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