Category: Feminism

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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Britney Spears is not someone I have paid much attention to over the years, so I was brought up short by Renee Roden’s Religion News Service article, published in NCR: “The trajectory of Spears’ career and public persona can be understood, some experts on evangelicalism argue, through the rise and decline of the evangelical purity…
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You know what it’s like when you return from vacation: a huge pile of mail. One magazine cover leapt out to me: “Prayer and Power,” with a photo of Paula Clark, “the first Black and first Episcopal Bishop of Chicago, on building a truly inclusive ministry.” My welcome home! I am always thrilled when our…
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As soon as I saw the title Crossroads, I knew this was an exhibit I had to see. We are at so many “crossroads” now: locally, nationally, internationally – in providing healthcare, aid, protection, political, social, and moral actions – in sorting out who we are and how we relate to each other and our…
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The beauty in this is beyond words, and yet words they are. Excerpts of a poem by Eliza Gonzalez: ***                         Hot mornings. Hot apple tea, honeyed.                         The mountains a fist knuckled on the horizon.                         Dust is coming, dust is not yet here. ***                         — Examples of what, I do not know.…
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If you’ve been in a book club in the last ten years, you’ve probably read, or at least considered reading, something by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian writer. Perhaps her remarkable breakthrough novel, Americanah. Perhaps the earlier one our club read recently, Purple Hibiscus. Perhaps her TEDx talk made into a book, We Should All…
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View Post You probably know the source of many of the misguided, nasty, misogynistic stories about Mary Magdalene and of the mostly, if not exclusively, men with agendas who propagated them. The main impetus for them came primarily from one short paragraph in the New Testament describing Jesus’ having to cast out seven demons from…
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I often say that. The church is real: no mystery about it. It exists, for a lot of good and for some, not so good. Whatever other beliefs exist around it, the church is real. And the Pope is human. After his shocking hospitalization and surgery, we pray for his recovery. Michael Sean Winters concludes…
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Last week I wrote about the possibility of the collapse of the Catholic Church. Now we have two spectacular examples of collapse, tragic collapse. As more details become known about the condominium in Florida, we learn about warnings that were never addressed. I’ve never seen such a tragic example of the mote and the beam…
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“And, historically, that’s actually a precondition for women ascending to power. Can they seize the moment?”  This headline on Alexis Grenell’s column in the print edition of The Nation attracted my attention immediately. She quotes New York State Senator Allesandra Biaggi: “We’ve got to move on past talking about the bad behavior of below-average men.”…
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