What should a doctor do when a terminally ill patient asks her to ‘end it all’ with morphine? What are the implications of expectant parents having Down’s Syndrome screening for their unborn babies? How do we cope and make sense of the world when our ageing parents no longer recognise us? I’m filling in […]
I am a locum pastor! My homie Stu is off on a well-deserved holiday with his family, and I’m helping hold the fort at Wellington South Baptist Church in Island Bay. Starting this Sunday, I’m preaching a five-week series on bioethics, humanity and hospitality. It’s called Matters of Life and Death and is based on […]
Since Kent showed me Sesame Street Unpaved, and I learned the thought that went into creating and writing for Sesame Street, I’ve been an even bigger fan of a favourite childhood show. Did you know that the main muppets are each there to represent a specific developmental age and stage, and their scripts are written […]
Welcome back to Dr Myk Habets from Carey Baptist College! In his earlier guest post on praying with his kids, Myk (pronounced ‘Mike’) talked about how he uses names for all three persons of the Trinity when he prays with his little daughter. In this update, written a year or so later, in 2011, for […]
We’d better start with a couple of Disclaimers, with capital Ds. 1: I write as an enthusiastic student of the art of home organising, not in any way as an accomplished expert. My bedroom floor is Exhibit A. 2: My house is pretty messy, most of the time. But it’s a much more organised messy […]
In case you missed the biggest news of the (/my) blogosphere last week, I have a guest post up at the glorious Lulastic and the Hippyshake. It’s an exciting week for this fangirl! She’s running a brilliant series of guest posts, How to be a ______ Parent, and she asked me to do ‘How to […]
Are you ‘courting’? ‘Going steady,’ as they said on Happy Days? Or my favourite early-twentieth-century ‘walking out together’? Yay! Enjoy it! What a very pleasant time of life, whatever you call it. The best piece of advice I have for you – just on the off-chance that you are in the market for some, and […]
At the risk of cheating in this series by pretty much stealing everyone else’s magic word… here’s the next instalment. Six words you should say today, from Rachel Macy Stafford in the Huffington Post: Very rarely does one sentence have immediate impact on me. Very rarely does one sentence change the way I interact with […]
Yeah, sorry. I see from my (unhealthily-often-checked) stats page that a fair few people come each day to Sacraparental to see if there’s anything new on the blog. Lately, the answer is often: nah. It’s a blip, not a trend, though. We’ve just moved house and are still unpacking (aka moving things out of boxes […]
Do you care about self-care? If you had the marvellous good fortune to host a goose who laid a golden egg for you daily, would you lovingly feed her the best worms in the garden, massage her little wings, make sure her bed was comfy (though not plumped with goose-down…) and generally cherish her? Or […]