Category Archives: spiritual practices

The Sacrament of Housework #5: My 6 Best Housekeeping Tips (and lots more of yours, please)

This is part of an occasional series mining the mundane to find the sacred. For a list of the posts in the series, head here. If I never had to do housework again, that really would be fine by me. But I like our dishes and clothes to be clean; a tidy house is restful […]

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The Sacrament of Pregnancy

Why a ‘sacrament’? The church has long taught that there are certain special moments where God is particularly present in our world. The ritual of baptism, the sharing of a communion meal. Different church traditions have argued about how many there are, but that seems to me to be a nonsensical question. God is particularly […]

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Easter with Kids: 32 Ideas for Celebrating Together

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 […]

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Lent with Kids, Week 1: Wisdom at Home

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 […]

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Lent with Kids: Getting Ready for Week 1

(Western) Lent in 2020 begins on Wednesday 26 February This is the first proper weekly post of our Lent with Kids series. If you’re reading this after the first week of Lent, or if you want to see the range of other Lent ideas we’ve got, you can also head here, to the series index to see what’s […]

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What’s the Point of Lent? #2: Jesus and the Early Church

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, […]

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Advent with Toddlers

Happy Advent, everyone! Today is the first Sunday in Advent, the four-ish-week period leading up to Christmas. Today was SBJ’s first appreciation of Advent. He’s almost two, so I wasn’t sure just how much would be appropriate for him, but lots of things surprised me about the day, so I thought I’d give a full […]

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God, Kids and Parents: Myk and Liam [Guest]

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 […]

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