I want to be like Anne when I grow up. My occasional Mighty posts are about this kind of dynamic: encountering characters in literature that actually change you for the better. Laura Ingalls is one, and so far I’ve also written about Cassie Logan, Alex Archer, Jean Valjean and the Tillerman children. There are plenty […]
It’s an odd feature of my experience of postnatal depression: I find reading modern literature, which is usually my staple, too hard, most of the time. It’s mostly because of the unflinching subject matter. I love Kate Atkinson’s writing, and thought last week – after three months of re-reading Patrick O’Brian’s marvellous Master and Commander […]
I am loving re-reading LM Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables books right now, and keen to share the joy. I’m working on a series of posts to accompany the experience of re-reading the books as an adult, so if you’re inspired, dust off your copies or find some in the library and join us! They […]
We’re now in Holy Week, where Lent morphs into Easter. In my house we’ll continue lighting our Lenten candles and saying the sentences about Jesus that go with them, but there are plenty of other special things coming along this week that can take their own place in household spirituality. So here’s a bunch of […]
Lucy lured me back to the land of Twitter with her genius #sexisminparadise hashtag for discussing Air New Zealand’s foray into #everydaysexism. It’s been nice to be back. I spend most of my time there caught up with politics and feminism. And books! (So here we are.) The (not really from the) BBC book challenge […]
Happy Week 1 of Lent! This is a progress-report type post on our first week of Lent with Kids. Here is the quick guide to all the Lent posts, and here’s where to start if you’re interested in how we’re celebrating Lent with candles, readings, prayers and art. My spiritual director once pierced me with […]
The pancake party was great fun, and we now have a seven-candle candelabra set up on the dining table – I am so rocking Lent! Well, the first three days of it, anyway… Now comes the hard part, for someone like me. I love ideas, so planning and designing our Lenten practice has been delightful. […]
This is the third in a mini-series looking at how different traditions celebrate Lent. You might like to start with the first post on Old Testament fasting and catch up on the second on Jesus and the Early Church. It wasn’t until I moved to New Plymouth, next door to a lovely Egyptian family, that I […]
This is a mini-series leading up to Lent, which begins in 2014 on March 5. You might like to catch up on the first part, looking at fasting in the Old Testament, before reading this one. In the Old Testament, fasting is usually portrayed as a spontaneous response to what Scot McKnight calls a ‘sacred, […]
Lucy from Lulastic and the Hippy Shake has been reading Parenting for Social Change by Teresa Brett and snipping quotes for her Facebook page along the way. Here’s one that has stayed with me. I’m convinced this is helpful and would change how many of us feel when we are at our most frustrated with […]