A few weeks after I started my first church job as a Pastoral Assistant, my parish priest advised me to join a union. “If you are going to be employed by the church,” he said, “then you are going to need it”. How right he was. I joined and have been a member ever since.
by Rebecca Bratten Weiss Margaret Atwood’s feminist dystopian novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, has been made into a television series, and as many remark that its themes seem especially relevant at this time, I can’t help but wonder: was there ever a time in which the theme of the appropriation of female fertility was not relevant?
Continuing Melanie Newbould's occasional blogs on faith and the arts. Ulysses I read Ulysses by James Joyce only about 10 years ago or so—and it was really that book that convinced me that Christianity might be the right path for me. It is a difficult book (at least for me); I don’t think I could
This is the first in an occasional series of blogs by Melanie Newbould: In these blogs, I am going to describe how I gradually came to realise that I believed Christianity was a way to a truth. Of course I don’t know anything about the journey that other have taken, so I am not sure
SOPHIE: Hello all! I am doing some research and writing on women saints and blesseds from about the twelfth century to the present and have found a terrific number of them who are celebrated for what we in the 21st century would consider extreme and bizarre penitential practices of self–mortification. Eating next to nothing, drinking
JENNIFER: (a medical doctor): This is a bioethics discussion. In a meeting today we were talking about what might be best practice re very prem babies – does one treat actively or not? In general at 23 weeks a baby IS treated actively and these days survival is good, but at 22 weeks it is
LAURA: There's a lot of stuff in the media right now about Ignatian Spirituality because of Scorsese's new film Silence. I'm wondering if anyone in the group has ever done a Jesuit retreat or gone through the Exercises? KAREN: I am a Jesuitical trained spiritual director who had to complete the spiritual exercises (either 30
We are delighted to announce that we are working on a new book from the Catholic Women Speak network. Following the success of the book we published to coincide with the 2015 Synod on the Family, Catholic Women Speak: Bringing Our Gifts to the Table, Paulist Press have invited us to publish another collection of essays in
Egeria (also known as Etheria or Silvia) is one of a handful of early Christian women writers whose work is known to survive. She is the author of an account of her own pilgrimage to the sites of Christian interest in the Eastern half of the Roman Empire in the late fourth century, published in
Lent - the slow-down, the rhythm of peace, the deep searching, the rediscovering of the thirst and hunger for the divine, for something beyond the possible. Lent begins with dust and ashes; the ashes of last year’s palms, the memory of dust of the Judean desert where for forty days Jesus rests his body, his
