I am not going to write much about the Pope’s summit now going on in the Vatican. I will remind you to wear a blue armband at Mass tonight as the Catholics Banding Together movement suggests. You will love the video they produced, especially if you’ve never seen and heard Theresa Kane’s 1979 address to…
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On a recent February Sunday at Mass, we celebrated Black History Month. Our pastor, who is Caucasian, donned colorful, African-inspired vestments. After the welcome and gathering, he went down to the aisle and called forth two of the parish’s African-American elders. A tall woman and tall man in African garb joined their hands over him…
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Did you notice this line in Josepha Madigan’s speech to We Are Church in Ireland? The full sentence is “Yes, we say to our daughters, you can be an altar girl but don’t get too ahead of yourself, you will never be a priest.” I love that Irish women who have succeeded in politics are…
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Well, to answer the question with a shaky “yes”, I often have to turn to those with thoughts much wiser than mine.  Brian Cahill on SemNet Live in February 2015 tackled the topic in Our Troubled Church and Why Some of Us Stay and helped reacquaint me with some of that wisdom. He quotes Michael…
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The irony does not escape me: On the day I’m writing this, the day after the State of the Union address, the two stories that interest me most on NPR and the BBC are about the speech and about the Pope’s acknowledgement that sisters have been sexually abused. Looking at all those Congresswomen in white…
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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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I’m sitting at the end of my friend’s bed in Sharjah, one of the seven United Arab Emirates (just outside its more famous sister city, Dubai). I’m on my winter break from divinity school and another friend and I have flown here to visit Bushra, one of our best friends from college. We hadn’t seen…
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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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