Category: Women’s Ordination

Here I am again – perhaps you are, too – going this way and that about the Church, about women and all genders and the Church, about…well, you know the drill. I hear the stories all the time about people, especially the young people we so desperately need, finding “church” elsewhere. This is particularly true…
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Just about a year ago I wrote a post on deacons.  Maybe the discussion begins every January. Not bad, like a liturgical anniversary or a dedicated month: Deacon Sunday, Deacon Month. Then on to other things. It was NOT in Deacon Month but in May 2016 that the leaders of the International Union of Superiors…
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This weekend I was searching through articles and websites for material for an ongoing feature on women I suggested for our church bulletin during Women’s History Month this March. (Funny thing about suggesting: you suddenly become the “volunteer” to put it all together! I really didn’t mind though because I had wanted this kind of…
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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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I have wanted to write about seminaries for a long time, but there always seems to be something else. Then this week, NCR announced a series to answer these questions: “How are priests being formed? Who is teaching them? How are seminaries adapting to the new wave of abuse crises and condemnation of clericalism from…
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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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I love this Leonard Cohen song, presented here as a poem. It is both a realistic and hopeful take on the future – and on our mission for peace and justice. As he says, “They’re going to hear from me”… and from all of us.   Happy New Year! Anthem By Leonard Cohen The birds they…
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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…
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IN THIS HOLY SEASON                IN HER HOLY VOICE       WHAT WOULD MARY SAY?     WHAT WOULD MARY DO?