July 5th, 2022

The Church fails the Bechdel Test

Feminist and LGBTQ Twitter was a-buzz the last few weeks with conversations about a new modern adaptation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Fire Island (rated R) is based on the real-life setting of Fire Island (an island near Long Island, NY) that is home to two LGBTQ-centric resorts, Fire Island Pines is a gay…
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July 2nd, 2022

Synod Answers

The role of women, including the “failure” to “make good use” of their contribution and their exclusion from formal ministries, was described as a “constant theme” in diocesan reports. “On the whole women were not considered a marginalised minority so much as a silenced, unrecognised majority whose gifts lie unwrapped and ignored in the parish…
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June 28th, 2022

Manna for the Wilderness

I often strive to find a way to say a “new thing” or to bring something forth in a “new light”. If you have read past posts, I’m sure you may have already noted successes and failures in this endeavor! This week I’d like to bring you a “new light” into our struggle as women…
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June 25th, 2022

Title IX

This is it: No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance. Fifty years ago, this brief provision was inserted into the education law of the United…
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June 18th, 2022

Protecting Life

The January 6 hearings are what’s preoccupying me this week. They raise as many moral issues as anything else, but I don’t want to write about all that. Rather, I will call your attention to expanded dimensions of what will preoccupy us sometime soon: what does it mean to protect life, especially from the perspective…
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June 11th, 2022

Not So Soon!

Terrifying! The headline on AP’s article by Nicole Winfield was reinforced by “unsourced speculation” that Pope Francis might be getting ready to resign. Visiting Pope Celestine V’s tomb (he resigned in 1294), appointing enough new cardinals to have a majority in the college, planning a briefing for ALL cardinals on the rules he just issued…
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June 7th, 2022

Loneliness and Authoritarianism

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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June 4th, 2022

Fourth Grade

I am thinking about fourth grade. Ten years old. Halfway through growing up. Neither child nor teenager. Not the innocence of second grade. Not as articulate as high school. How will they survive fourth grade? I think about the Latinx names we are hearing. When I taught about the West, I remember that south and…
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May 31st, 2022

Don’t Lose Your Head

Saturday a week ago was “Ordination Day,” for males only, of course, in our archdiocese. A group of us supporting women’s ordination in the Catholic Church always attend these yearly ordinations – oh, not inside the basilica where we are patently not welcome (by the Archbishop and his minions at least) but outside, always outside.…
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May 28th, 2022

Avoiding Scandal

Is that what Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone is doing by refusing communion to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi? I thought that debate was over for good, that something between the words of the Pope and ordinary common sense must have prevailed among the bishops to avoid further public ridicule. It’s reported that Pelosi received communion last week…
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