Category: Women’s Ordination

The gifts of hardness, of coldness, of barrier, of rigidity, of intransigence are the most difficult to see, let alone appreciate. Our Church as an institution, in fact, has been presenting them to us throughout the ages, and in doing so may have given us a most generous bequest: something against which we can react,…
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Britney Spears is not someone I have paid much attention to over the years, so I was brought up short by Renee Roden’s Religion News Service article, published in NCR: “The trajectory of Spears’ career and public persona can be understood, some experts on evangelicalism argue, through the rise and decline of the evangelical purity…
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[Editors’ note: Anne Tropeano is a 2020 awardee of the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship. This is the second of three in a series of reflections from our 2020 awardees on how the scholarship impacted their journey over the academic year. WOC will also be hosting a “Meet Fr. Anne” Zoom event on Thursday, September 2,…
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[Editors’ note: Claire Hitchins is a 2020 awardee of the Lucile Murray Durkin Scholarship. This is the first of three in a series of reflections from our 2020 awardees on how the scholarship impacted their journey over the academic year.]  “My soul magnifies the Lord!” So begins Mary of Nazareth’s revolutionary song of praise, prompted…
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You know what it’s like when you return from vacation: a huge pile of mail. One magazine cover leapt out to me: “Prayer and Power,” with a photo of Paula Clark, “the first Black and first Episcopal Bishop of Chicago, on building a truly inclusive ministry.” My welcome home! I am always thrilled when our…
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As soon as I saw the title Crossroads, I knew this was an exhibit I had to see. We are at so many “crossroads” now: locally, nationally, internationally – in providing healthcare, aid, protection, political, social, and moral actions – in sorting out who we are and how we relate to each other and our…
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What is going on at Commonweal? I am so shocked by Adam Fleming Petty’s introduction to a book review that I am inspired to violate the gender norms of “the nineties,” though of which century I am not sure. Was it really true that “A man undergoing a midlife crisis buys a sports car” in…
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View Post You probably know the source of many of the misguided, nasty, misogynistic stories about Mary Magdalene and of the mostly, if not exclusively, men with agendas who propagated them. The main impetus for them came primarily from one short paragraph in the New Testament describing Jesus’ having to cast out seven demons from…
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I often say that. The church is real: no mystery about it. It exists, for a lot of good and for some, not so good. Whatever other beliefs exist around it, the church is real. And the Pope is human. After his shocking hospitalization and surgery, we pray for his recovery. Michael Sean Winters concludes…
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On April 30, 2021, my colleague Ellie Harty, co-editor of Equal wRites (the publication of the Southeastern Pennsylvania Women’s Ordination Conference), asked me to write an article on the 2022 Vatican Synod. I agreed. On May 21, 2021, the Vatican announced that Pope Francis has changed the date of the Synod to October 2023 and…
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