Hi, it's Elise Lunan host to Pulling the Thread. Today I'm talking to Megan Waterson, a Harvard-trained feminist theologian.

We've grown up surrounded by beauty ideals that promised confidence, but often delivered shame.

In a special episode of a millennial mind, I sat down with Nicola Adams to explore how appearance-based compliments and body talk

shape our self-worth without us realising it. In partnership with the Dove Self-Esteen project,

we unpack the tools to change the conversation for ourselves and for future generations.

Listen now and download the free body confidence journal at dove.com forward slash y2k.

Hi, it's Elise Loonen, host of pulling the thread. On this show, we pull apart the web in which we all live

to understand who we are and why we're here. My hope is that these conversations spark moments of

resonance and plant tiny seeds of awareness so that we might all collectively learn and grow.

Here is today's guest, Megan Waterson, and how she thinks about the seven

deadly sins, which were referred to as the seven powers in the gospel of Mary. The way I integrated

in my life is that these seven powers give us an opportunity to become aware of how human we are, not so that we can berate and

get angry at ourselves and feel like a failure, like, oh, shit, I'm knee-deep in rage again,

right? And then feel like, okay, I'm failing at being spiritual. The whole point for me is to be human, which means dealing with these seven powers

and at different points of our lives, and sometimes concurrently, several of them, all in one day.

But the opportunity that we have then is to awaken while we're knee-deep in one of these powers and make a different choice.

Megan Waterson is a Harvard-trained feminist theologian. I love her.

In our conversation today, I share more about how I found one of Megan's earlier books and how her perspective completely shifted

my thinking and helped me to find faith. Fun fact, Megan and I started a little book club, just me and her

during COVID. I'll have to link our reading in the show notes. And now I'm very, very excited that

Megan has a new book out called The Girl Who Baptized

Herself.

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