Sleeping Letters
When Marie-Elsa Roche Bragg was just 6 years old, her mother committed suicide. Now, many years later, Marie-Elsa returns to that night. Going back to that moment, inhabiting this defining tragedy, allows for an exploration of the grief but also brings healing – as well as the affirmation that it is her experiences as a priest that have carried her.
In a unique and remarkable mix of prose and poetry, and written partly as a series of unsent letters to both her mother and father, Sleeping Letters is a way of connecting to past family, an attempt to reconcile with loss, as well as a radical exploration of Marie-Elsa’s own faith. While harrowing and unforgettable, it is also an immensely beautiful book, with a luminous sense of a daughter’s love.
Towards Mellbreak
After many generations, it is now Harold who runs Ard Farm. Out on the fells, he feels his father’s presence, and there is hope that he, his grandmother and his Uncle Joe will be able to take the farm forward and prosper. But their way of life is under threat: farming is undergoing huge change and increasingly harmful intervention.
Towards Mellbreak is a hymn both to the landscape of Cumbria and to a disappearing world. Poetic, beautiful and tragic, it exposes the struggle to preserve traditions and beliefs in the face of change, and an assertion of the power to be found in the rituals we pass down through our families.
Thought for the Day
50 years of fascinating thoughts & reflections from the world’s religious thinkers
BBC Radio 4 staple Thought for the Day has been running for 50 years, aiming to capture the mood of the country and speak to it in a way that reaches people of all faiths and none.
Take a tour of half a century of daily reflections from some of our most prominent and insightful thinkers, including Pope Benedict XVI, Desmond Tutu and Mona Siddiqui. Covering our changing attitudes to sexuality, science, politics, national life, international relations and more, Thought for the Day charts the constant evolution of British society from its uniquely timeless perspective.
Marie-Elsa’s Thought For The Day is under the chapter ‘Science, Nature and Covid.’ Her piece is titled: ‘Collared Doves and Climate Change.’
Feminist Theologies
Interstices and Fractures
This assemblage of feminist theologies represents a series of vital entanglements. Chapters are written from different cultures, geographies and discourses and brought together around themes as specific and wide-ranging as immigration detention, hate crime, discrimination, rites of marriage and partnership, and artistic and religious imagination.
The contributors variously echo, celebrate, question and contradict each other. Despite the complexity and allied as they are with liberation, decolonial, ecological, queer and other theologies, these perspectives seek not only to confront and resist the problems, oppressions, and omissions of hegemonic theologies but also to realize better worlds.
Marie-Elsa contributed chapter is Chapter 6, Veil of Mother.
