Category: Preaching Equality

“Unless you have a good reason to believe they were not there, put them there!” Dr. Amy-Jill Levine issued this charge to us in her marvelous contribution to FutureChurch’s Women Erased series with a presentation titled, “Women in 2nd Temple Judaism.” She was referring to the missing women of the Bible, specifically in the New…
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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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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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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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Perhaps one of the most touching descriptions of God as multi-gendered, if gendered at all, came from Jesus’ analogy of God as Mother Hen. How appropriate for the Easter season! And how appropriate for all of us who witness for the leadership and ordination of people of all genders in our Church. From Luke 13:31-32,…
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The week before Christmas I visited the Yucatan town of Merida, Mexico, and its surroundings. Inspired, I include here now, mostly in pictures, my dream for a new Church for a new year. This is the cathedral in the main plaza in Merida regaled in Christmas light. Flowers, leaves, tendrils of growth, both dazzling and…
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This painting is by Flemish painter, Pieter Bruegel the Elder. If you know his paintings, you also know they are most always teeming with abundant life. Everyone is busy, tending to chores, to animals, to each other. Men and women in this painting are toiling or transacting or talking or taking time for skating, sledding,…
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Because it’s part of a Vatican apology, I’m willing to accept the characterization of peripheral. A Vatican apology, you say? When has that ever happened? Last week, as it turns out. Thierry Bonaventura, the communications manager of the Synod of Bishops’ office, apologized to “all LGBTQ people” and republished the link to the New Ways…
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Isn’t this painting magnificent? Artist Bryn Gillette sweeps us into the swirl of life surrounding women who are with child. Out of whirlpools of love and suffering and chaos, they are bringing forth new life in all its variety, in all its sweetness, in all its hues and tints and tones, in all its depth…
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“A valiant woman” is the lovely complement that Pope Francis gives to Sister of Loretto Jeannine Gramick in a handwritten note to New Ways Ministry last June. NCR reports: “I know how much she has suffered,” the pope wrote. “She is a valiant woman who makes her decisions in prayer.”  New Ways Executive Director Frank…
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