Wife, mom, dentist, writer, New Yorker, Southerner, Sydneysider, believer, sinner, overall case study in contradictions. @stephsphillips www.plansinpencil.com
About Stephanie Phillips
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All the Lies I’ve Believed about the Spectrum (and the Truth)
All your sorrows have been wasted on you if you have not yet learned how to be wretched. – Seneca I just finished a binge of Netflix’s Love on the Spectrum, and the series was everything it was recommended to be: heartfelt, honest, and sweet. There was the added bonus that it was filmed in […]
Self-Care for My Inner Child and Me
Not to rub it in, but we’re in better shape over here in Australia than you are in America (pandemic-wise). But I’m still smarting from the effects of lockdown and, in particular, homeschooling — although I know that both could re-emerge at any moment. When the lockdown walls first began closing in, I knew that […]
Come Get Your Manna: Feasting on the Mysteries of God’s Justice
Trying to understand someone else’s predicament lies at the very heart of what it means to be a Christian. – Fleming Rutledge, The Crucifixion My younger son’s kindergarten class is doing a unit on farms this term and they’ve been learning about chickens and cows and pigs and the like. The other day he came […]
Tell It Like It Will Be: On the Only Word that Matters
Let’s Talk (Honestly) about Our Confusion and Loneliness and Hope
Compassion, Connection, and the Singular “With” of the Gospel
This is the Moment: His Presence in the Present
Life in the Time of Coronavirus: What to Do in Quarantine
Movies, Podcasts, TV shows, Books, and More
Sitting Shiva for Kobe: On the Complicated Nature of Grief, and Humans
If there’s anything the movie This Is Where I Leave You taught me — besides that Tina Fey should not do accents — it’s about shiva, the Jewish tradition in response to the death of an immediate family member. I’d heard of shiva before but for the first time saw it dramatized in the film, […]
The World Is Always Burning
“Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don’t be afraid.” – Frederick Buechner Warning: extremely first world problems dissected ahead. Sydney is burning. And I don’t like my house. These problems are not equal, but they are both real. The rest of the world has finally caught on to what people in […]
The Death of Curiosity: On Information Cocoons and the Frights of Surprise
On September 11, 2001, I became a cable news junkie and would be crippled by the addiction for the next decade and a half. I remember sitting in the breakroom at my dental school with the other students, watching footage played and replayed of the planes hitting the towers, of the devastation at the Pentagon […]
Lie Down and Die: The History of Miserable Motherhood (and an Unmapped Plug)
“I declare if I tho’t I was to be thus occupied for the rest of my life, I would — I was going to say — lie down & die.” So wrote a new nursing mother Laura Wirt Randall in 1828, as quoted in the book Scarlett’s Sisters by historian Anya Jabour. To which we reply, […]
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