Author: Ellie Harty

I recently attended a play (masked but in person – hooray!), Minor Character, subtitled “Six Translations of Uncle Vanya at the Same Time”.  To say it was raucous would be an understatement. The gentle, poignant Chekhov play I had always known suddenly turned into circus, loud, brash, and very much in-your-face in its presentation of…
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As you read this, international leaders, climate experts and activists are coming together at the United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland to determine where we are now, and what we need to do in the future, globally, to protect the earth from past, present, and future harm from fossil fuel emissions. I…
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1 In our Church, we who are not male gendered persist in trying to get our messages through to hierarchical powers. Like the people who never acknowledge or reply to our phone or text messages, however, they “ghost” us. They vanish, and they banish us. Andrea Cohen in her poem Ghosting tells us just how…
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I think all who champion the cause of women’s leadership and ordination within an oppressive and suppressive institution like the Catholic Church could relate to the body of works of the Nobel Prize for Literature honoree, Abdulrazak Gurnah. Furthermore, and more significantly, I think all those who perpetuate this oppression and suppression could learn, grow,…
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I thought October 3, the 27th Sunday of Ordinary Time, should have been renamed Misogynistic Sunday, the 27th Sunday of “Extraordinary” Time. What a choice of readings! I was transported back to childhood listening to fairy tales, surely not written nor inspired by God, but by men. “Once upon a time” we had listened, so…
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“If you’re going to be a feminist on a hot planet, you have to be a climate feminist.” — Katharine K. Wilkinson, a co-author of the climate anthology “All We Can Save” The United Nations recent landmark climate report either terrified or inspired or managed to do both to all of us. Writing for the…
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Add some imagination to your concept of Church, I’ve argued with its hierarchy. Give something new, even radical, a chance. It just might save you. And, by the way, giving what we are doing to the environment, opening our minds in all areas might save us, too. So, let’s just do that and see what…
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As the young, lithe, graceful and seemingly grace-filled dancers circled, held hands, bent and raised and swayed their bodies, individually and communally lifted their arms and pranced their joy or crumbled and undulated their despair, ancient tunes and plaintive songs, Sephardic Judeo-Spanish “Ladino” phrases and rhythms and rousing and mournful solo violin and Ashkenazi klezmer…
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The gifts of hardness, of coldness, of barrier, of rigidity, of intransigence are the most difficult to see, let alone appreciate. Our Church as an institution, in fact, has been presenting them to us throughout the ages, and in doing so may have given us a most generous bequest: something against which we can react,…
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If you have not signed up for, or accessed online, NCR’s marvelous Earthbeat series, billed as “stories of climate crisis, faith and action”, please do so. The postings are brief but rich and varied; the suggested actions inspiring and, even better, manageable!  Beginning September 1 and continuing through October 4, authors, Brenna Davis and Michael…
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