Category: General

We need new words for this new world we’re entering, and I thought “anthropause” was one of the most compelling among them. It refers to the breathing space we have recently had – and may temporarily have again – in our high-paced human activity during the pandemic, a space in which air became clearer, sounds…
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Right now we are pulling up in our collective vans to move once again, this time into a new era in our country, in our world, in our Church.  And, as with every move, it’s time to decide what we will take with us and what we will leave, knowing even that will never be…
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I am about to commit a terrible act of appropriation, which is what I do every week, if I’m honest. It feels more sensitive this week because I’m going to report on an interview on decolonization by Shannen Dee Williams and Tia Noelle Pratt, Black Catholic scholars. As part of the giant European presence in…
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And so we wait – on this Election Day – in this pandemic year – on this evolutionary revolutionary earth. We wait for forces other than just our own to determine our fate.  We wait to see when and if our voice has joined in unity with theirs. We wait to applaud – or just…
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The American poet Louise Glück has just been awarded this year’s Nobel prize for literature. Here is one of her poems: Celestial Music I have a friend who still believes in heaven. Not a stupid person, yet with all she knows, she literally talks to God. She thinks someone listens in heaven. On earth she’s…
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What possibilities arise when we take on rearranging world-wearied words, exhausted expressions, tiresome traditions, tedious tenets, parched principles, prosaic practices to discover, or even create, something utterly fresh, invigorating, maybe even electrifying! In fact, perhaps the one good thing that comes out of the Catholic Church’s centuries old ban on any other than male words,…
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Every few days I have to visit and find them. Yes, there is the green and brown frog blinking at me until I get too close and she cannot stand it and bolts into the water. Ah, over there, thank heavens, is the turtle basking in afternoon sun; don’t let the others know, but he’s…
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Never mind our personal politics, we in the Women’s Ordination Conference have to be jubilant: A Black and Indian-American woman is on the ticket for the highest office in our land! Catholic Church hierarchy: Take heed. Equality and inclusion are coming your way – fast. Your medieval misogynistic mindset is on notice, and you cannot…
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I don’t envy the members of the Church hierarchy and all who follow their mandates. I don’t envy them when, with consciences afire, biases lit up, monstrous ignorance in flames and dangerous and destructive misogyny ablaze, they finally have to reckon with their treatment of, and discrimination against, women and all genders and all races…
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Did you think about “chauvinism” when hearing about the murder of George Floyd by Derek Chauvin? One definition is “an irrational belief in the superiority or dominance of one’s own group or people.” We used that word for decades about men. Now we think of two men – one charged with murder, one who dishonored…
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