“A brilliant, deeply learned, and carefully argued book.”
Caitlin Smith Gilson
“Grounded and soaring. Its thorough foundation in philosophical theology delivers, and the text understands that literary excurses are no mere peripheral complementarities but do bring the conversation in through another way.”
Mary Harrington, First Things: Best Books of 2025
“Angela Franks’s superb new study of modern selfhood, Body and Identity: A History of the Empty Self.”
Carl Trueman, First Things: Best Book of 2025
“My scholarly book of the year is Angela Franks’s Body and Identity: A History of the Empty Self. … I was dazzled both by its learning and its commitment to articulating a Christian understanding of selfhood. … Franks does a remarkable job of showing how so many of these thinkers allow us to see more clearly into the problematic nature of our age. This is a book that deserves wide readership.”
Law and Liberty
“Illuminates how our culture came to be unrecognizable to so many. … It is a careful and vast intellectual history. … This deeply considered work is a welcome contribution to the present literature on the body, gender ideology, and the self. … Substantive, careful, and expansive.”
Civitas Outlook
“A remarkable book, which belongs on the shelf next to identity-interested thinkers like Charles Taylor or Carl Trueman. Indeed, Franks may be the most helpful of the three in making sense of present controversies. … Rich and nuanced … a work of considerable value.”
Article on the Expanded Reason Award →
Religion and Liberty Online
"Body and Identity, years in the making, … is nothing short of masterful in both scope and depth. It shows why we desperately need public conversations about gender, sexuality, and culture to include trained academics. Indeed, very few academic researchers can dedicate years, perhaps decades, of intense research and reading to produce a comprehensive book like this one, which could never have come to fruition otherwise. Combining intellectual history and theology, cultural analysis and biology, psychology and literary reflections, Franks shows that how we think about our bodies is inextricably connected to questions of identity."
Mary Harrington: Substack
“Her aim is gratifyingly ambitious: essentially Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self but more Catholic in its priors, less turgid in its prose, with post-structuralism and the missing bit between Augustine and Descartes added back in. …
She is remarkably erudite, a lucid writer, and comfortable toggling back and forth between metaphysical and postmodern vantage-points, meaning she can draw intellectual flexibility from the latter, without ever sacrificing the former’s commitment to truth. Absolute catnip … just so, so good.”