• Introductions
• First impressions
• Background on Other Feminisms and Leah Sargeant

Reading

• How is the newsletter structured? What sort of community and what sort of thought does that structure encourage?
• Why might it be valuable to expand the scope of feminism as most people define it to include issues of life and euthanasia?
• Same question, but for the boyhood issues raised in the education issue.
• One of the things that made me a paid subscriber is how Sargeant incorporates past reader comments into future issues. Were there any particular comments that stood out to you as thought-provoking?

Passing On

Alexis: Aging with Grace: Flourishing in an Anti-Aging Culture ; For the Children’s Sake (also AmblesideOnline or Charlotte Mason’s 6-volume set)

Sarah: Jesus and the Jewish Roots of Mary by Brant Pitre

Victoria: Building the Benedict Option by Leah Sargeant

Related Episodes: #128, Invisible Women

Knowing 

• What is lectio divina? 

• https://www.usccb.org/bible/national-bible-week/upload/lectio-divina.pdf

• What  are our experiences with this form of interpretation?

• How has it helped us think differently about Biblical texts or our own religious practices?

Reading 

We will perform a lectio divina reading of a Biblical passage and discuss it afterwards. We encourage our listeners to use your Bibles along with us.

Passage: James 4:13-17 (New American but feel free to use your own)

13 Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we shall go into such and such a town, spend a year there doing business, and make a profit”—

14 you have no idea what your life will be like tomorrow.* You are a puff of smoke that appears briefly and then disappears.

15 Instead you should say, “If the Lord wills it,* we shall live to do this or that.”

16 But now you are boasting in your arrogance. All such boasting is evil.

17 So for one who knows the right thing to do and does not do it, it is a sin.

Reflection:

What did we notice that we wouldn’t have through just reading alone?

What did we learn from each other’s perspectives and observations?

How can we bring lessons from this kind of reading and observing to other parts of our spiritual lives?

Passing On

• Christina: M. Basil Pennington, Lectio Divina: Renewing the Ancient Practice of Teaching the Scriptures

• KB: Son of Laughter by Frederick Buechner 

• Victoria: Daily Lectio Divina podcast by Sharon Garlough Brown https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/daily-lectio-divina/id1507769421

Knowing

• Why this episode and a bio of St. Teresa
• Our experience with her work

Reading

Interior Castle

• Metaphors for the soul
• Medieval worldview
• Some tricky bits of the text

Let nothing disturb you

• How the prayer frames our relationship to God
• Other prayers central to our religious practice

Autobiography

• Praying for physical illness
• Summing up the connection between the bodily and the spiritual

Passing On

• Christina: Thomas Traherne, Centuries
• Marie: https://sarahbessey.substack.com/p/breath-prayers-for-anxious-times
• Victoria: "The liturgy is of comfort to the disarrayed mind. We need not choose our thoughts, the words are aligned, like a rope for us to cling to." - Sister Monica Joan, Call the Midwife

Why this episode

Our past with the Biblical text

A bit of historical background

A bit of interpretation history (including Christine Yoder and Jacqueline Vayntrub)

Reading

Proverbs 31:10-30

Notable bits of the passage

The Most Misunderstood Women of the Bible and Proverbs 31

Passing On

The January chapter of The Year of Biblical Womanhood

Truth’s Table: How Black Christian Women Resist White Labels | Christianity Today

The Other Woman in Proverbs 31