Author: Ellie Harty

I’ve seen this painting many times at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and each time it has enthralled me. I look at it and think, this is my church – unsteady, twisted, constricted, shrunken, tired. Then I come another time and think, this is my church – quietly beautiful, a refuge and sanctuary, and, if…
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Sometimes when science and art and the work of everyday life intersect within a single subject, the results can be enlightening, revelatory, and even breathtaking. For me, it started with a morsel from everyday life described in one of July’s Earthbeat posts. It was the title which first captivated me: “Oblivion and Salvation in the…
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I often strive to find a way to say a “new thing” or to bring something forth in a “new light”. If you have read past posts, I’m sure you may have already noted successes and failures in this endeavor! This week I’d like to bring you a “new light” into our struggle as women…
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Anne Applebaum is a Pulitzer Prize winning historian and journalist at The Atlantic. Ezra Klein is an American journalist, political analyst, New York Times columnist, and the host of “The Ezra Klein Show” podcast. I offer you excerpts from Klein’s May 17 interview with Applebaum as she and he discussed Hannah Arendt’s 1951 classic The…
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Saturday a week ago was “Ordination Day,” for males only, of course, in our archdiocese. A group of us supporting women’s ordination in the Catholic Church always attend these yearly ordinations – oh, not inside the basilica where we are patently not welcome (by the Archbishop and his minions at least) but outside, always outside.…
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Some characters are on a hunting trip in William Faulkner’s novel The Town. Tom Deignan, writing in the April 2022 issue of America, describes an unsettling encounter they have: “A noise in some shrubbery compels one character to speculate that it might only be a ‘rabbit’ or it might be ‘a bigger varmint, one with…
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When we speak of women’s (and non-binary gender’s) roles in the Church and world, we, more often than not, receive quite marvelous reflections like this one from Robancy A. Helen, a member of the Idente Missionaries, in her article “Women Everywhere Live Out Mission of Caring for Others” in the May 10, 2022, Global Sisters…
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“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair: Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.” Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass…
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Since I am so besotted by Avivah Zornberg, Scotch-Israeli master of midrash, and her insights into the Book of Exodus, I decided to expand on last week’s post. (As a quick reminder, midrash is the Jewish practice of deeply reading sacred texts again and again to uncover ever-changing and new sacred and intellectual layers of…
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Tradition, as we know only too well, has been wielded – um, traditionally, actually – throughout the ages as a cudgel to keep us from engendering deep and meaningful change in our Church. I won’t name all who have been harmed, but women and LBGTQI? particularly stand out today. As recently as June 2019, however,…
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