by Angela Batie Carlin Hate is a strong word. As I type this, I’m preparing to board a plane to Seattle to meet my two-week-old niece. I’ve never seen her, but I already love her. I love my parents, too, and my siblings, and my new husband. I’ll admit, I do love my own life. [...]
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By Johanna Hatch On the eve of Liam’s nine-month birthday, he spent the night the same way he did the night after he was born – sleeping on my chest. At the nine month mark, I jokingly say he’s “been out as long as he was in.” Nine months of pregnancy is a bit of misnomer [...]
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We just caught word of the release of a new collection of essays about young Catholics in the US: Young & Catholic in America. Check it out!
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By Rebecca Lynne Fullan Humility. This week’s readings come praising and encouraging it—but what is it? Is it taking the last place because you really want the first? Is it not asking questions when things get too crazy and messed up? Is it keeping quiet? Inviting the poor over for dinner? Approaching God and not [...]
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By Kate Henley Averett Ever since we decided to move to Austin, I’ve had this nagging question at the back of my mind – should I look for a church there? And if so, what kind? A few months before the move, I did some research – googling “Austin queer friendly churches” and other similar [...]
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By Johanna Hatch One of the first cards we received upon announcing my pregnancy was from a friend-couple who simply wrote, “Thank you for letting us be part of your village.” Sometimes I wonder if the common phrase, “It takes a village to raise a child” really means, “It takes a village to be a [...]
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by Jen Owens This is an excerpt from a retreat talk, incarnations of which Jen has given at retreats in Northern and Southern California. Hearing about the Assumption of Mary has made me wonder about why Mary has such an important place in our tradition since I was a little girl. This leads me to [...]
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by Rebecca Lynne Fullan Sometimes my life gets humid. The air all full and heavy, and I can’t even feel the water that’s weighing it down, but I know it’s there, making it hard to push through. About a week ago, the storm broke, and I was suddenly articulating all the suspected wrongness of my [...]
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by Jen Owens I’ve spent the past three weeks on break from classes with my family in Southern California. The intent was in part to work a bit at the parish in which I grew up, but more than anything else, to rest in the company of my family. Slowing down is a difficult thing [...]
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by Johanna Hatch I would know how to raise a girl – after all, I had grown up a girl in this world, and in the Catholic Church. If I had a daughter, I could teach her how I had learned to navigate this world. But as the divine plan would have it, I saw [...]
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by Kate Dugan When my husband and I decided we were ready to begin thinking about having a kid, he texted me a reference to a Meg Ryan/Tom Hanks classic, Joe Versus the Volcano. In the 1990 movie, Tom Hanks plays an uptight, nervous wreck diagnosed with some fatal disease. He gets an offer to travel to [...]
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by Rebecca Curtin I’m just a soul whose intentions are good Oh Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood –Nina Simone Sometimes I feel, as a Catholic who regularly expresses dissatisfaction and frustration with some Church teachings, like I am caught between trying to express hope for a different future for the Church with love [...]
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Being a lesbian, Catholic Latina is not an easy combination but somehow I’m surviving. That ponderous combination of self-identities left me with something psychologists and sociologists call “internalized homophobia.” As an adolescent I never thought I could tell anyone else how much I hated myself and how much I wanted to die. “They’ll think I’m [...]
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By Johanna Hatch “God is not only fatherly, God is also mother who lifts her loved child from the ground to her knee.” –Mechtild of Magdeburg For much of my young life, I struggled with the image of God the Father. In terms of parental imagery, my mother loomed much larger in my life than my [...]
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By Jessica Coblentz Throughout this Sunday’s readings, we find overt prohibitions of greed: “Take care to guard against all greed,” Jesus warns, “for though one may be rich, one’s life does not consist of possessions.” Undoubtedly, a good number of homilies will be preached on this theme. But I simply can’t think about the message [...]
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by Brittney Smith The rough brown carpet burned my knees as I asked Jesus to come into my heart for the first time. I was ten years old when I walked into our empty living room and, noticing an evangelist preaching from the TV screen, felt obliged to stop. I crossed myself in front of [...]
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by Kate Dugan I have been thinking a lot about one of the moments in From the Pews in the Back when Eileen Markey writes about deciding what sort of spiritual/religious lineage to raise her son in. She describes this conflicted sense of wanting to shield her son from some of the less attractive angles [...]
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by Rebecca Lynne Fullan When I saw Sodom and Gomorrah peeking at me from the very top of today’s readings, a cranky grumpy feeling glowered back from inside. I had made my way to these readings from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ website, and, along the way, I saw Archbishop Wuerl’s statement “welcoming” [...]
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Patheos.com is running a series of articles on the future of religions in the U.S. We contributed to their “Future of Catholicism” series. Check it out over at their site: “Young Adult Catholics: Telling Our Own Stories.”
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