Joelle Kidd

Book review: 'Contemplative Knitting' by Julie Cicora

A Q&A with Joanne McNeil, author of "Lurking: How A Person Became a User"

"I’m Thinking of Ending Things is, like so many stories, a story about a man masquerading as a story about a woman. Which ultimately makes me wonder why we need to spend so much time trying to figure out how to build a better mask."

In March, Mad Men actress January Jones posted an Instagram video of herself dancing while wearing a light-therapy mask—a hauntingly blank full-face plastic covering backlit by a blood-red glow. The mouth of the mask is open in a grimace, and through its massive eyeholes, Jones’s blue eyes are barely visible. Swaying her hips to the music, she inserts a straw into the mouth of the mask and begins to sip from the Coors Light can in her hand.
Jones is one of a handful of celebrities who’ve beco...

Leaders in the Lutheran and United churches on language and anti-Blackness

Near the end of Miss Americana, the Taylor Swift bio-doc directed by Lana Wilson, in that bring-it-on-home section such movies always seem to conclude with, Swift muses about the demand for constant reinvention that’s placed with special intensity on female pop stars. In an industry ready to discard a woman by the time she’s thirty-five, Swift says, you have to keep “constantly finding new facets of yourself that people find to be shiny.” Various iterations of Swift flick across the screen as...

Anglican spiritual care providers are far from of one mind on the ethics and parameters of MAiD.

Accessibility in the church is about more than physical accommodation. For these Anglicans, acceptance comes from the very core of a church’s theology.

Around the world, death cafés allow people of all faiths (and of none) to gather and discuss one of life’s greatest mysteries: its end.

For the Sisterhood of Saint John the Divine, a vow of poverty is about ‘more than dollars and cents.’
Since even before St. Paul wrote in 1 Timothy that “the love of money is the root of all evil,” Christians have struggled to make peace with the very fact of money. “You cannot serve both God and money,” Jesus warns in the gospels.
In fact, the Bible has an enormous amount to say on the topic of money, and perhaps that is why faith, poverty and wealth have played a touchy dance since Christia...

n 2015, news outlets published a photo of the lifeless body of three-year-old Alan Kurdi, a Syrian refugee, washed up on a Turkish beach. At the time, Syria’s devastating civil war had been ongoing for four years. Yet Canadian aid groups, including the Primate’s World Relief and Development Fund (PWRDF), reported a dramatic spike in donations which many traced directly to the publication of the photograph. Almost five years later, those numbers haven’t gone back down, Anglicans involved in refugee ministries say.

“The apple trees were coming into bloom,
but no bees droned among the blossoms,
so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit.”
Rachel Carson, Silent Spring
There’s an old custom called “telling the bees.”
The Rev. Sheilagh Ashworth is using her hive tool—a thin piece of metal with a right-angled hook at its end—to pry sticky bits of honey and ease languid bees off the top of an open hive box as she relays this piece of folklore.
“If an important thing happens in your life—there’s a...

A Montreal-based Anglican is telling the world about finding forgiveness in the wake of sexual assault—but Noah Hermès’ message doesn’t stop there.

Note: Noah Hermès, the subject of this article, is non-binary, a gender identity that is not exclusively male or female, and uses the pronoun “they” rather than “he” or “she.” At the time of the assault and the writing of the blog post referenced in this story, Hermès used their birth name, “Nina.” They have since changed their name to Noah.

Noah ...

On a table set against the wall of St. James Cathedral in Toronto, an array of framed photographs shows the smiling face of Patricia Carpenter. Neatly lined up next to the pictures are three Cabbage Patch Kids dolls—some of her favourite childhood toys—pages of her poetry and writing, and the purple and green wallet in which she carried photos of her younger brothers and ultrasounds of her baby.

When Patricia’s body was found in 1992, she was 14 years old.

“I didn’t talk about my daughter unt...

When Canon Judy Rois was a student in the late 1970s, she wanted to take a preaching course. But when she went to sign up, she discovered she wasn’t allowed because she was a woman.

After much lobbying, she recalls, she was let into the class—the only stipulation was, she had to wait until everyone else had entered the room, then sit at the back, so as not to “distract” her male classmates. “I could sit at the back quietly and not say anything and not make any noise, because a man might see m...