Category: Guest Post

May 21st, 2019

You Are Mine

This started out as a reflection on Mother’s Day. I had begun thinking about the Church as Mother, and my own role as a mother, and was just piecing a lot of those thoughts together when I began to process the anti-abortion laws currently being voted on and passed in several states in the U.S.…
Read more

January 26th, 2019

The Interfaith Feminist Imagination

I’m sitting at the end of my friend’s bed in Sharjah, one of the seven United Arab Emirates (just outside its more famous sister city, Dubai). I’m on my winter break from divinity school and another friend and I have flown here to visit Bushra, one of our best friends from college. We hadn’t seen…
Read more

December 29th, 2018

A Journey of Wild Hope

Staying ‘because it’s our church, too’ had come to feel like complicity by another name. And even staying for the Eucharist made me wonder at what point I had to stop letting the hierarchy use the real presence to excuse the inexcusable. Does Jesus ever feel like he’s being held hostage? (Melinda Henneberger’s “Why I…
Read more

November 13th, 2018

Why I Never Wore A Veil

“Where do you see yourself in five years?” If my 19-year-old self were to look into a crystal ball and see where I was now, she would see someone very different than the woman she was on the path to becoming. Flash back to 2013, before the Trump administration took office, before the “Me Too”…
Read more

October 2nd, 2018

I Just Can’t Let It Go

I’m not about being political, in a national politics sort of way, but it’s difficult to start this week without commenting on the content of the Kavanaugh hearings and what they said about the role of women in powerful institutions – most notably for our purposes here, our own Church- and how this role and…
Read more

September 15th, 2018

Relief

I need a break from the head-spinning chaos of the sex abuse scandal, so I’ve decided to write about something in the church that works: the Catholic Relief Services (CRS). It – and I – were born in the same year, 1943, so we are celebrating 75 years together. The odd name “Relief” relates to…
Read more

September 8th, 2018

Who but women can save the church?

  I remember exactly where I was when I heard the news of the Pennsylvania Grand Jury hearing, and I expect I will remember for quite some time. Twelve other young women and I had just concluded our initiation ceremony into the Loretto Volunteer Program, surrounded by the Sisters of Loretto at their Motherhouse on…
Read more

September 4th, 2018

What the Church can Learn from #MeToo

I am a recent graduate from Loyola Marymount University, where I received a bachelor’s degree in Theology. I write as a theologian, a convert, a current Catholic volunteer and a concerned member of the Church. This past year I have watched the power of the #MeToo movement, started by Tarana Burke in 2006, create a space…
Read more

August 21st, 2018

Moving forward in my own discernment of my call to ordained ministry

I am extremely grateful for the support of Women’s Ordination Conference and the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship this past year. As I struggled to complete my last year of my M.Div studies it meant a great deal to have this financial support, and to know that there are many people who are supporting me in…
Read more

August 14th, 2018

The Deep, Healing Waters of Discernment

[Editors’ note: Sarah Holst is a 2017 awardee of the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship for Women Discerning Priestly Ordination. This is the first of three in a series of reflections from our 2017 awardees on how the scholarship impacted their journey over the academic year.] There is a story in Revelations about a portent of…
Read more