I suddenly realized that I haven’t written much about the rest of the world, even though I’ve tried not to write about the elections in the United States. They have absorbed my energy and my waking hours for several months. So, I will use two stories about women from foreign sources to bookend the story…
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Right now we are pulling up in our collective vans to move once again, this time into a new era in our country, in our world, in our Church.  And, as with every move, it’s time to decide what we will take with us and what we will leave, knowing even that will never be…
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I am about to commit a terrible act of appropriation, which is what I do every week, if I’m honest. It feels more sensitive this week because I’m going to report on an interview on decolonization by Shannen Dee Williams and Tia Noelle Pratt, Black Catholic scholars. As part of the giant European presence in…
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And so we wait – on this Election Day – in this pandemic year – on this evolutionary revolutionary earth. We wait for forces other than just our own to determine our fate.  We wait to see when and if our voice has joined in unity with theirs. We wait to applaud – or just…
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This morning I am reading for and writing this blog in an unusual silence. There is no electricity in my building, so I hear the rain on my windows from no-longer fierce hurricane Zeta and the sloshing of the traffic in the street below. No radio. No mechanical or electronic hums. Just quiet. Somehow the…
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This week, there really is an “elephant in the room”: the upcoming election – and, well, you know, another particular “elephant” – making it difficult to think about anything else. Having acknowledged that is our situation today, however, I would like to point a way forward to a brighter future – also definitely needed this…
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Reading the “News Frenzy” regarding the breaking story this week about Francis’ support of LGBTQ civil unions, I misremembered the context of this old quote. It came to mind because of Francis DeBernardo’s comment in New Ways Ministry’s response: “If the pope supports such couples, what should prevent lower-level Catholic officials from doing so?” One such…
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A couple of months ago, I learned of an educational program hosted by the Catholic Leaders Latin-American Academy on the International Social Doctrine of the Church called Feminism, Gender and Catholic Identity. The theme stemmed from an invitation from Pope Francis to present a proposal for a new Christian Feminism to analyze the philosophical and…
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I belong to a small faith group (small in numbers, hopefully not in faith!) whose recent discussion topic was: How do we live with uncertainty. Easily, I ventured, especially compared to living with its opposite which I have always found infinitely more difficult. Really, I wondered, how do we possibly manage to live with the…
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Do you expect a Franciscan theologian to address toxic masculinity in an article in the National Catholic Reporter? Dan Horan did that this week, writing about President Trump’s failed responses to the corona virus pandemic, personally as well as politically. Horan notes that it was only in 2018 that the American Psychological Association issued “guidelines…
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