Category: Uncategorized

A blog note: we here at WOC will be transitioning to a new platform, and as a result, ourblog will be down for a bit after Easter. I look forward to connecting with you all when weare back up and running. On behalf of WOC, I want to wish you all a holy and soul-full-filling…
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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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The blue suit said it all. When Sr. Nathalie Becquart addressed the vast audience gathered by New Ways Ministry, she wore a blue suit. Immediately, there was no clerical barrier confronting those who might be less receptive yet who had decided to participate. When she spoke to Global Sisters Report, she was more casually dressed,…
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We have just celebrated the feast of the Annunciation. A submissive Mary or a courageous Mary – depending on your take on the story or perhaps on women, themselves – has just said either: “Let it be done unto me” or “Yes”. Most of us, I hope, prefer the latter. In any case, Mary did…
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Some recent articles focusing on Women’s History Month have been quite provocative, especially when penned by women of color. I have had my proud and persistent dedication to feminism challenged in the past and have made amendments as a result, but these newer perspectives along with their reminders of some past problematic manifestations of the…
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Ready to have your heart broken?  Then be inspired again? And proud to be Catholic? Read the narratives of some Catholic nuns on the ground in India during this horrific time of pandemic, suffering, and deprivation. We all see the clips on the news. We watch as cameras skim over jammed hospitals, overwrought caregivers, funeral…
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Suppose you held out your hand, and I – or any member of your community or parish or friendship circle – placed into it three gifts: one corn kernel, one speckled bean, one pumpkin seed. You would then hold in your hand the Indigenous people’s “three sisters” which Native American writer and professor of botany,…
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[Editor’s note: This post is the first in our weekly Black History Month series, which will appear on Thursdays in February in addition to our normal Tuesday and Saturday blogs. Check back weekly for more, and please share!] Even though Mikki Kendall’s Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot has been in…
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Some criticized Francis’s decision to change Canon Law and allow all people to be acolytes and lectors because it reinforces the clericalism the Pope wishes to eradicate. I am especially sensitive to this charge because I bristle at the least exercise of clericalism. But it’s so odd – it’s only clerical when women can get…
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I wasn’t even looking for a poem.  In this week of new beginnings and promises, of cautious hope and restrained joy, I just wanted to memorialize a turning.  In this new year, during this week of new beginnings, we will have two new world leaders, one, blessedly, a mixed race woman, beginning to take on…
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