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There is something deeply uncomfortable about the story of Dinah in Genesis 34, and it is not simply what happens to her.

It is also what happens to her in the way we tell the story.

Genesis tells us that Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, went out to see the women of the land. Shechem, the son of Hamor the Hivite prince, saw her, took her, and violated her. The language of the passage has traditionally been understood as describing sexual violence or rape.

And then something strange...

There is something deeply interesting about the way the Bible tells the story of Solomon's downfall.

Solomon begins as the king everyone wants to remember: wise, wealthy, powerful, internationally connected, and chosen to build the Temple of Yahweh. His reign is presented as a period of extraordinary achievement.

And then, suddenly, the women appear.

“King Solomon loved many foreign women.”

Moabite women. Ammonite women. Edomite women. Sidonian women. Hittite women.

And according to the narrator,...

John 4:6–17 has traditionally been read as a story about evangelism. Jesus encounters a Samaritan woman, reveals himself as the giver of living water, exposes her complicated marital history, and eventually becomes known among the Samaritans. In many Christian interpretations, the woman is remembered primarily as a sinner who encounters Jesus and receives salvation. In others, she becomes an exemplary missionary who leaves the well and tells her community about Jesus.

This essay offers a...

Wrote this years ago and found it on MySpace.

Summary

Just some ramblings about Cinderella and Beauty and the Beast.

When I was younger, I loved reading fairy tales and watching the Disney versions of them. In fact, I still enjoy them. Some of my favourites were Rapunzel, Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, The Frog Prince, Thumbelina, and, of course, Beauty and the Beast and Cinderella.

As I grew older and continued reading and watching television, however, I began to notice something interesting. Out...

What if the Bible itself contains traces of a much more complicated understanding of the divine one in which God can be described as a mother, compared to a woman searching for something precious, and even imagined as a mother hen gathering her children beneath her wings?

And what if, behind the biblical condemnation of goddess worship, there lies the memory of an older religious world in which Yahweh may have been worshipped alongside a female divine figure known as Asherah?

These questions...

The Council of Nicaea (325 AD) addressed the divinity of Christ and formulated the Nicene Creed. The Council of Laodicea (~363 AD) made an early list of Bible books but excluded Revelation. The whole New Testament canon was officially set at the Council of Carthage in 397 AD.

On Emancipation Day, we remember the spirits who refused to drown.

I love mermaids. I always have. Their history, their mythology, the way they shimmer at the edges of our collective imagination. I find it all irresistible. But on this Emancipation Day, I realised something that shifted everything I thought I knew about these creatures of the sea.

Black mermaids didn’t originate in European fairy tales or myths. They crossed over from West Africa to the Caribbean, carried across the Atlantic in...

People say Solomon “turned from God” because he worshipped with his wives. But what if he weren't falling? What if he were listening?

Solomon’s marriages were political alliances between nations. His wives were foreign women who had to give up their cultures, gods, and languages to fit into his world.

When he prayed with them, maybe he wasn’t betraying God. Maybe he was showing empathy, acknowledging their pain and displacement.

Yet we blame them, not him. The wives become the reason for his...

Most people recall Jezebel as the notorious queen from 1 & 2 Kings—but what if we shift our gaze from moralising to historical nuance?

A Phoenician Princess at Israel’s Court

Jezebel was the daughter of Ethbaal (also spelt Ithobaal I), king of Tyre and Sidon, a connection that made her a valuable political match for King Ahab of Israel (National Geographic, 2017). Her marriage likely served as a strategic alliance, aimed at securing commercial and cultural ties between Israel and Phoenicia...

Names are more than labels in the Book of Esther; they are artefacts of empire, memory, ethnicity, religion, and resistance. The woman at the centre of this story carries not one name but two: Hadassah and Esther. Both names hold a world of meanings, each reflecting the competing identities she navigates. Esther and Hadassah form a powerful artefact that encodes survival strategies, imperial pressure, and the enduring legacy of agency under patriarchy. Esther's Hebrew name, Hadassah, is...

Before patriarchy erased her, people envisioned the Wisdom of God, Sophia, as female. She danced through creation, cried out in the streets, and stood beside God at the dawn of the world.

In reclaiming Sophia’s story, we recover an ancient affirmation of the divine feminine—a voice of insight, comfort, and revolutionary presence.

Sophia at the Beginning

In Proverbs 8, Sophia speaks of herself as preexistent:

“When [God] marked out the foundations of the earth, then I was beside him, like a master...