Category: Preaching Equality

Envisioning, imagining what Church could be in an age in which we desperately need the wisdom and insight of new inclusive leadership and ministry, including our own, I came upon this article called Quest for the Sacred: Walk in the Church of the Woods by Meggen Watt Petersen. She describes a church in New Hampshire…
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How rich the Church would be if only the blessed gifts outlined by poet, Jan Richardson below – and so many, many more that you could name – from all genders – were permitted. I’m not telling you here anything you don’t already know, but sometimes, I think, in this week of the celebration of…
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“Peace on the earth, good will to all.” Is that what you are singing as this Christmas season comes to a close? My intentional Eucharistic community thought that we were so revolutionary to use “all” and then Judy Heffernan discovered that they made the same change, replacing “men,” in a Philadelphia parish church. But our…
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IN THIS HOLY SEASON                IN HER HOLY VOICE       WHAT WOULD MARY SAY?     WHAT WOULD MARY DO?                                  

I have John Marchese of the Quixote Center to thank for these words of introduction and closing, and the incomparable Nikki Giovanni for the poem. “Silence sometimes offers a window into the truth of the world around us – who and what can be heard and who or what is being silenced or oppressed,” John…
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What were you thinking about last Sunday, the feast of Christ the King? It is hard to get that Palm Sunday earworm out of my head, but our celebrant Joe Sannino introduced a new concept: Christ the friend. You may know that I belong to a small faith community, now an intentional Eucharistic community after…
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“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”…
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As we protest and/or witness against the Church we have, I like to keep before us the Church we want: one, needless to say, with a multi-gendered approach to ministry and new possibilities for reaching people. I would like to start “small” by describing one way our small Eucharistic community does just this. This particular…
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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…
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Feast of St. Mary Magdalene – Readings This is only the second year since Pope Francis elevated the celebration of St. Mary Magdalene to a feast day, at the same level as the other apostles. Since her feast falls on a Sunday this year, many churches may not hear the readings. But, using the feast readings…
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