July 20th, 2019
Since I’m writing this blog early this week, I am hoping that there are no news flashes that I wish I had covered. Instead, I am going back to two articles I have saved on women deacons. They came to mind because of articles in NCR about a talk by Ally Kateusz that looked for…
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July 13th, 2019
Would you believe that Nine to Five is almost forty years old? NPR’s Morning Edition on Thursday featured the song as one of its American Anthems. It’s fun to wake up to, and interesting to hear the examination of the lyrics by Lynn Neary, Karen Nussbaum, Rebecca Traister, and Merrill Garbus. It’s not as simple…
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July 9th, 2019
Commencement speech time has just ended, and those of us who attended graduations, from eighth grade through college and beyond, may have heard one or two or too many! Still, wherever we are in life, I think we need these pep talks yearly – maybe even daily. And we need them especially to inspire us…
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June 25th, 2019
We talk about – or more often mourn the loss of – the gifts of women to our Church. Last week I wrote about an article touting women’s gifts as a resource to “save the world” and added, “and also the Church.” The reach and vision was universal. Now I’d like to focus on some…
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June 22nd, 2019
When Frank DeBernardo of New Ways Ministry and I first discussed expanding this blog to be more regular, we joked that not much is happening about women’s ordination – not like the many bishops leaping into the fray to condemn, fire, and otherwise attack LGBTQ people. Well, the latter has not abated and Bondings 2.0…
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June 18th, 2019
“Can Women Save the World?” an author of a recent New York Times article asked. Wow, I thought. I was just hoping they could save the Church! Tina Brown, founder of the Women in the World summit, former New Yorker editor-in-chief, and host of a podcast TBD, argues that “a new paradigm of female leadership…
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June 4th, 2019
Regina Bannan in The Table has given us enlightening, witty, and profound insights into James Carroll’s “To Save the Church, Dismantle the Priesthood” article in The Atlantic. Humbly, I’d like to add a progressive (I hope!) Catholic layperson’s reaction to part of the article as well. Often criticism articles like Carroll’s focus on analyzing problems,…
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June 1st, 2019
This week my attention is drawn to the different ways ordained women understand their ministry. My first inspiration is a response in The Atlantic to the James Carroll piece that I wrote about last week. Susan Bigelow Reynolds writes of her experience in graduate school when she lived in a Catholic rectory (which the priests…
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May 28th, 2019
The other week I attended a one man play called How I Learned What I Learned. Autobiographical, the play’s “one man” was the playwright himself, and the drama focused on his growing up in one of the poorest neighborhoods of racially divided Pittsburgh. He took us on a journey through his life, loves, poetic and…
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May 25th, 2019
Perhaps with a side of reproductive rights? What a week for causes dear to us! Suddenly the things we talk about in our impassioned conversations are on the front pages, one in The Atlantic, no less. So I’ll go there first. Are we working so hard to get ordained into something that ought to be…
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