Author: Anne Ashworth

Anne Ashworth reviews Fiona Maddocks’s biography of Hildegard of Bingen, the twelfth-century abbess, visionary, composer and healer who gained rare power in the Church, though she taught that women were inferior.

Final extract of Anne Ashworth’s spiritual journal (1993-2000) records her ‘oblique light’ experiences, joining the Quakers, the loss of God, and her turn to loving the world’s ‘implicit forms’ directly.

A poem in which the first evening of spring sun makes familiar houses look different, and the poet mourns three friends who will not see the spring.

Review of Aileen La Tourette’s novel The Oldest Girl, an imagined life of St Maria Goretti that attacks Catholic culture, poverty and the sentimentalised cult of the child saint promoted by Pius XII.

Anne Ashworth’s journal entries (1991-92) record her move from liberal Christianity to Cupittian non-realism, the loss of God as a bereavement, and her attempt to love the world for its own sake.

Second extract of Anne Ashworth’s journal, 1986-91: meditation, poetry versus contemplation, and her growing wish to leave the Church as language and doctrine become untenable. She values Christian myth and worship but struggles with honesty.

First extracts from Anne Ashworth’s spiritual journal, 1980-84: a URC lay preacher’s reflections on the cross, prayer, poetry and doubt as her liberal Christianity moves towards atheism while her religious experience remains undeniable.

Anne Ashworth reviews Dinah Livingstone’s Poetic Tales, which argues for the necessity of poetry and myth and traces Christian myths of the Kingdom of God, body of Christ and Logos as human creations.

Anne Ashworth reviews Ruth Padel’s Darwin: A Life in Poems, praising its portrayal of Darwin’s family, illness, loss of faith and delight in discovery.

Anne Ashworth’s poem sets the hubris of Babel and Icarus beside our over-reaching today, with greenhouse gases, ozone damage and deforestation under a godless sky, and ends with a call to action.