Feminism
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Reflections on Body Theology
Bodies matter. They shape how we experience life—through our senses, movements, and our interactions with the world. Yet, our bodies are frequently sites of inequality and violence. In 2025, state-sanctioned war and genocide (in Palestine and Ukraine to name just two places) targets and seeks to erase the bodies of entire communities, both physically and culturally. The COVID-19 pandemic has left lasting physical, mental, and societal scars, with millions facing health challenges like long COVID, deepening inequalities, and strained healthcare systems. Physical and sexual violence, especially gender-based violence, remains a global public health crisis. The bodies of Black people, ethnic minorities, immigrants, and refugees are still treated as though they…
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“We’re people, not parts of people”: Severance, trauma, and the stories our bodies tell
*Spoilers for Severance Series 2 ahead* I’ve just finished watching the second series of Severance, Apple TV’s psychological work-place thriller. It centres on the lives of employees at Lumon Industries, a biotechnology company where some workers have undergone a medical procedure, the titular “severance.” Once a chip has been implanted in their brains, a strict division is created between their professional and personal lives. Employees have no memory of their personal life while at work, and no awareness of their work life outside of the office. As a result, each individual essentially splits into two separate personas: the “innie,” confined to the workplace, and the “outie,” who experiences life beyond…
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Yet still they speak
Content warning: sexual violence But she said to him, “No, my brother; for this wrong in sending me away is greater than the other that you did to me.” But he would not listen to her. He called the young man who served him and said, “Put this woman out of my presence, and bolt the door after her.” (Now she was wearing a long robe with sleeves; for this is how the virgin daughters of the king were clothed in earlier times.) So his servant put her out, and bolted the door after her. But Tamar put ashes on her head, and tore the long robe that she was…
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Spiritual Midwives from Christian History: Lilias Trotter and Simone Weil
The Spiritual Midwife Metaphor After experiencing the typical hospital birth that included multiple nurses too busy to be present and a hasty doctor, a midwife assisted birth was a completely different experience for me. Midwife Anita Damsma-Young guided me through the growing of a human being—from an egg and a sperm to a 10-pound 4-oz baby boy who splashed into our Canadian Tire blow-up swimming pool in the comfort of our living room one early April morning. I remember her respect for the female body, her consistent reassurance, and her wise suggestion of various positions that successfully turned him from his late onset breech position. Instead of an anxious pregnancy,…
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On Matrescence and Birthing myself
Becoming a mother is not the unifying ‘one-size-fits-all’ journey that popular culture would have us believe. Mothers are required to work out their identity as women, who they have been and who they are becoming all in the shadow of the myth of the Perfect Mother. It is therefore refreshing that within the last 18 months conversations about matrescence have begun to move into more mainstream thoughts and conversations (see: Lucy Jones’ book ‘Matrescence: On the metamorphosis of pregnancy, childbirth and motherhood’ and Zoe Blaskey ‘Motherkind: a new way to thrive in a world of endless expectations’). Matrescence – a word my spell check does not recognise – is the…
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The Divine Nervous System
‘Be still and know that I am God.’ –Psalm 46:10 ‘Be still’ – engage the parasympathetic portion of the nervous system[1] – ‘and know’ – internally, through your embodied felt sense[2] – ‘that I am’ – that the truth of who you are – ‘God’ – is Divine. What if the Divine is the resolution of trauma and the flow of a regulated nervous system? What if making love with the Divine is living as fully human and fully divine, moving in and out of activation and deactivation, sympathetic and parasympathetic, nervous system states[3]? I have travelled a long way on my spiritual path. I have journeyed up and down,…
