Author Archives: Rosalind C Hughes

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About Rosalind C Hughes

Rosalind C Hughes is an Episcopal priest, poet, and author living near the shores of Lake Erie. After growing up in England and Wales, and living briefly in Singapore, she is now settled in Ohio. Rosalind is the author of A Family Like Mine: Biblical Stories of Love, Loss, and Longing , and Whom Shall I Fear? Urgent Questions for Christians in an Age of Violence, both from Upper Room Books. She loves the lake, misses the ocean, and is finally coming to terms with snow.

Holy Innocents: a pieta

The stoles are cobbled together from whatever orange fabric I can lay my hands on in any given season; the constant that binds them together as a family – except for the orange colour – is the children’s handprint pattern that finishes each one off at the ends… Continue reading

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All in the family way

It seems as though the depth and strength and sheer closeness of God’s love for us defies any single image of relationship that we can dredge up and dress in poetic language. God is our father and our mother and our lover. 
And then, and then, God became flesh, and dwelt among us. Continue reading

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Word, wordless

A brief message for Christmas Day If, like me, you have memories from long before you learned how to talk, then you know that even before it speaks an infant tells itself stories and lays them down, woven into the … Continue reading

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Emmanuel

Emmanuel Away from the crush of the crowd and the hubbub of the inn, aside in the stableChrist is born;in the silence that prepares for his first breath,God speaks: “I am with you.”

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The longest night

Morning after the longest night,like the first day of creationwhen evening fell before the dawn;as the dream goes before awakening,the linened tomb before resurrection,the twilight womb before the birthof the Christ, all partand particular to his Incarnation,this nurturing dark that … Continue reading

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Mary’s song, our song

The name Mary cried havoc and announced the day of the Lord’s deliverance from the bonds of oppression. Mary’s word to the angel, “Here am I, the servant of the Lord,” was the acceptance of a mantle, the mantle of Miriam, the sister and peer of Moses. Mary’s, “Let it be with me” was saying, in effect, “Bring it on.” Continue reading

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Suffer the little children

Rumours of rumours; and the rub is that in this country, in this time, we cannot dismiss them until the day is done and the sun has set over the farthest gate. It should not be this way. Continue reading

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Because love is the miracle

Love is what it takes
to make the other
miracles true… Continue reading

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Karl Barth, St Paul, and the stickiness of sin

“Who … is aware of man’s real wretchedness, save he who is aware of God’s mercy?” Barth lectured his students in Bonn. We know our sin, we are convicted of it, Paul discovered his error in persecuting the followers of Jesus only when he was confronted by the living Christ himself, the revelation and reality of God’s saving mercy. Continue reading

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It’s (not too) complicated

It means beating swords into ploughshares, guns into shovels, removing them from the hands and the lives and the deaths of our children. There is no deeper shadow cast than the deaths of children, and the enormity of the problem before us is our mountain to climb. Continue reading

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