One blood

This article demonstrates the connectedness of members of the human family with each other and all of creation; discusses the nature of injury, sin, and woundedness; and offers examples of how cultivating countercultural appreciation for silence and self-knowledge is the basis for reconciliation and justice. the article also draws significantly on a number of spiritual traditions and contemporary psychology to flesh out the teachings of jesus, "love your enemies, bless them that curse you, and pray for those who persecute you." although many traditions are cited, the primary lens used for viewing this teaching is midrash, or reflection, on the aramaic language and culture--the language and culture of jesus. with these various spiritual and psychological perspectives, connections are drawn between our community of inner voices, our exterior community, whether family, intentional, activist, or faith community, and the global/cosmic community.     

Uncovering the ‘saintly Anchoress’: myths of Medieval anchoritism and the reclusion of Katharine de Audley

This article uncovers the lost history of the early fourteenth-century religious recluse, Katharine de Audley, a woman whose life came to be both distorted and romanticised by legend and literary adaptation in the centuries that followed. Tracing first the various literary treatments of Katharine as medieval anchorite, and second, her lived history as it emerges from the records, and by placing both within the historical and ideological context of medieval anchoritism, the author argues for the female anchorite as forming part of a critical practice which continued to address socio-religious and personal needs both in her own day and long after she and her vocation had fallen from immediate cultural consciousness.     

General Sisters,General Store / Big Rock Candy Mountain

The article is a summary of conversations with two artist pairs: Dana Bishop-Root and Ginger Brooks Takahashi of the collective General Sisters, General Store in North Braddock, USA, and Helen Reed and Hannah Jickling of the project Big Rock Candy Mountain in Vancouver, Canada.     

British Lesbian Poetics: A Brief Exploration

In a post-feminist, post-lesbian feminist, postmodern or queer world, should lesbian work remain clearly identifiable, even when it refuses to claim lesbian identity as such? Scanning anthologies from the past three decades of lesbian poetry, and focusing particularly on the work of Maureen Duffy, Marge Yeo, Dorothea Smartt, Gillian Spraggs and Carol Ann Duffy, Liz Yorke addresses issues of lesbian visibility, lesbian identification, lesbian desire, and lesbian performativity. How do we identify what constitutes a lesbian poetic in an era when ‘lesbian’ as an identity is less overtly defended, and many anthologies gloss over lesbian difference in prioritizing a higher order dedication to theme?