Jump directly to the Content

Call the Midwife: Always Sorrowful, Always Rejoicing

What the nuns and midwives of the 1950s taught me about living among the poor.

Whoever heard of a midwife as a literary heroine? Yet midwifery is the very stuff of drama. Every child is conceived either in love or lust, is born in pain, followed by joy or sometimes remorse. A midwife is in the thick of it, she sees it all.

-Jennifer Worth, The Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times

It's hard to talk about poverty. It's harder still to write about it. To convey the experience on film is nearly impossible—without resorting to stereotypes, tropes, depressing statistics, or wildly unrealistic endings. For those who have experienced working and living with people in generational poverty, it can be an isolating. Beyond the challenges of everyday life, many enthusiastic and mission-minded Christians have found themselves stuck when faced with the burden of representing the experiences of their friends and neighbors in poverty. How do you do it well?

I recently found a show—on television!—that seemed to answer this question better ...

Tags:
Posted:
March
Support Our Work

Subscribe to CT for less than $4.25/month

Homepage Subscription Panel

Read These Next

From the Magazine
Should the Bible Sound Like the Language in the Streets?
Should the Bible Sound Like the Language in the Streets?
Controversy over Bibles in Jamaica, the Philippines, and Germany reveal the divide between the sacred and the relatable.
Editor's Pick
What Christians Miss When They Dismiss Imagination
What Christians Miss When They Dismiss Imagination
Understanding God and our world needs more than bare reason and experience.
close