Category Archives: whanau

Feminism's unfinished business, Penny Ehrhardt | Sacraparental.com

Feminism’s Unfinished Business [Guest]

  A warm welcome to Penny Ehrhardt! Penny runs a public policy consultancy called Ehrhardt Advisors. She is a writer, researcher, international human rights law practitioner, parent, Soka Gakkai Buddhist, and lifelong feminist. Formerly based in Napier, New Zealand, she is currently undertaking doctoral research into the economic and social rights of single-parent families at Oxford […]

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Advent in Art with He Qi: The Visitation

A warm welcome to this year’s Advent in Art series, where we join thousands of others in contemplating artistic works while we wait, wait, wait for Christmas. For an introduction to this series, and He Qi, the artist featured in 2014, please see the first post, on the Annunciation. Week 2: The Visitation The mood […]

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The Sacrament of Breastfeeding #6: Mastitis and the Trinity

Welcome! This is a reworking of an earlier post, from March 2013 (just so I’m not soliciting undue sympathy: I’m fine now!).  Being a woman equals being in community. The same might feel true for men (I hope it does), but I can’t write that blog post, being in possession, as I am, of two […]

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Making Parenting Easier #1: 12 Ideas to Make You Feel Better

This is part of a series aiming to help us all go easier on ourselves and make our parenting lives more enjoyable and satisfying. The whole series list is here and more links are at the bottom of the post. [Update: 2.5 years later I’ve revised this and added some stuff in. Feel free to suggest […]

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Other People’s Grandkids [Guest]

A warm welcome today to my good friend Rob Kilpatrick, who wrote this reflection on Facebook yesterday and let me filch it for the blog. You’ll be glad you read it.   I’m incredibly lucky to be granddad to 11 wonderful kids. I don’t deserve to be but there you have it, grace upon grace. I […]

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8 Essential Tips for Supporting a Pregnant Partner

I often tell my husband he needs to write a book about how to be an awesome partner to a pregnant person. It seems more likely that I’ll write a blog post about it though, so here we are. My husband was a superhero supporter through my pregnancy (and beyond). When your partner’s pregnant, it’s […]

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A Northern and Southern Christmas Treat

About a third of you, Gentle Readers, are based in the Northern Hemisphere, where the church calendar was born and raised: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and so on, until Advent begins another church year again. That means that your wintry Advent is naturally an expectant, waiting time that builds to the celebration of Christmas […]

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When the State Breaks Up Families

I had a nightmare recently, where my husband and I were both sent to prison – separate prisons. I don’t remember what we were convicted of or whether we’d done it. I just remember the horror of realising that our punishment was the break-up of our family. How appalling. I did a criminology paper at […]

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