Archives

  • Faith heroes: Betty Greene, the pioneering ministry pilot

    Betty Greene was a pioneer missionary pilot and a co-founder of MAF, the Mission Aviation Fellowship. Elizabeth ‘Betty’ Greene was born in Seattle in 1920 to a Christian family who brought her and her brothers up in the Christian faith. Fascinated with flying from childhood, Betty took lessons and gained her pilot’s licence when she […]

  • Faith heroes: Catherine of Siena, who boldly called out corrupt clergy

    Catherine was born to a cloth dyer in Siena, Italy, in 1347, the twenty-third of twenty-six children, most of whom didn’t survive infancy. It was a tough time and place to be born: the Black Death, which was to kill a third of Europe, was spreading; much of what we now know as Italy was […]

  • Faith heroes: Perpetua, one of the first martyred Christian women

    Of the many accounts of the martyrdom of early Christians, one of the most compelling is that of a woman, Perpetua, who was executed in an arena at Carthage, now a suburb of Tunis in Tunisia, in the year 203. Let me give you some background. By ad 200 the vast and unstable Roman Empire […]

  • Faith heroes: Harriet Beecher Stowe, the most important woman in the US in 19th century

    In the nineteenth century Harriet Beecher Stowe was the most important woman in the United States. It is reported that during the American Civil War, when she was introduced to President Lincoln he said, ‘So this is the little woman who gave us this great war.’ Harriet was born in New England into the Beecher […]

  • Canon J John: ‘Finding Comfort in the Craziness of Covidia’

    I imagine I’m not alone in feeling that I have been mysteriously pushed through the doors of some magical wardrobe and now, in a state of severe bewilderment, find myself gazing around a strange, unwelcoming landscape. It is definitely not C.S. Lewis’s Narnia; this hostile desert – which I take the opportunity of naming Covidia […]