The Spirited Crone blog is where I tangle with spirituality one word at a time. I do it because words matter. They wound their way into me through the stories from my childhood. First in Jewish and Christian scriptures, and…
Presented at Restoring Dignity Building Bridges, the 2025 National Restorative Justice Conference. We’re about to tip toe where angels fear to tread. In my reflections about restorative justice I raise the often-marginalised territory of spirituality and religion, wonder about remorse…
If we are made in God’s imageand I’m reliably informed that we arethen Paddy’s mirror of the divineis worth exploring more. No booming voice from heaven heardinstead, his warm and gentle tone‘hello darling’, the moment you appearloving you just as…
Right from the start I was totally engrossed in Oppenheimer and didn’t falter across the whole three hours. Perhaps because it was obvious early on that the protagonists considered themselves to be the ‘good guys’ in the world. And that…
Like other women, I’d been stunned and frightened when women’s voices were forcefully suppressed at the Auckland Let Women Speak rally in March 2023. The main speaker was to be Posie Parker, (Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull) a gender critical activist who uses…
I’d never heard of Kellie-Jean Keen-Minshull (@Posie Parker) until her Let Women Speak events in Australia unleashed a media storm. There were loud demands that this tiny British woman be shut up and shut out of New Zealand. So, I…
some people may be surprisedto find that I spend a lot of liferummaging around in the pastnot because I long for some nirvanathat was better than now – not at allbut because it seems so like now my bible fascinates…
I didn’t catch your namesaid my friend the nurseto the doctor, who hadn’toffered a name or smile feverish, full of infectionnot making sense of muchstill upright, I felt a bother, assumingI wasn’t sick enough to be there hospitals, said Thomas…
sick, flat on my backstaring at the ceilingReality wanted a saywondering, raw as alwaysif this was how I would dieno cat, dog, human or fish beside me why should that be a problem? I askednot to me dear, she saidpositively…
Times change. Dial A Prayer is now a thoroughbred stallion that lives near me, but in the 1960’s it was a machine. A prayer machine that people could phone to hear a daily prayer. This was where my public writing…