The beauty in this is beyond words, and yet words they are. Excerpts of a poem by Eliza Gonzalez: ***                         Hot mornings. Hot apple tea, honeyed.                         The mountains a fist knuckled on the horizon.                         Dust is coming, dust is not yet here. ***                         — Examples of what, I do not know.…
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If you’ve been in a book club in the last ten years, you’ve probably read, or at least considered reading, something by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, the Nigerian writer. Perhaps her remarkable breakthrough novel, Americanah. Perhaps the earlier one our club read recently, Purple Hibiscus. Perhaps her TEDx talk made into a book, We Should All…
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Traditionis custodes is the name of the motu proprio issued by Pope Francis in which he ordered Bishops to reduce the use of the pre-Vatican II liturgy. I was not going to write about this because I didn’t want to take on the Pope about something else that I thought was a mistake. But then…
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Maybe what we need in our fraying, graying, grating old Church is a more appealing and enticing overhaul, one that energizes young people, that engages conservatives as well as progressives, that challenges everyone of every race and  gender to preserve the old by infusing it with the new. I’m talking about honoring the dynamics and…
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On July 4 of this year I marched in an Independence Day parade in a small town in northern Michigan. Main Street (near a gorgeous lake) was impressively packed with young and old, flourishing flags and clamorously cheering. Unfortunately, however, those cheers were not extended quite so enthusiastically to us! I was marching with a…
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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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Last week I wrote about the possibility of the collapse of the Catholic Church. Now we have two spectacular examples of collapse, tragic collapse. As more details become known about the condominium in Florida, we learn about warnings that were never addressed. I’ve never seen such a tragic example of the mote and the beam…
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[Editor’s Note: This post is written by Alyssa, our summer intern whom we’re so excited to be welcoming to the WOC team! Alyssa (she/her/hers) is a Catholic young woman from California and an incoming college student. She has worked in women’s advocacy throughout high school, done personal advocacy for women’s ordination, and is very involved…
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