The Just Word

"Choosing Love" with Ezra Doyle

Today Ezra Doyle invites us to explore the apostle Paul’s warnings about time, and consider our relationship now to limited time; engage Pope Francis’s Laudate deum and the questions of time, climate emergency, and a new world; and embody these ideas with the help of A Return to Love by Marianne Williamson and Sinéad O’Connor.

"Before us are two options. In all things, there are only two options. Fear and love. We can listen to the prophets of doom. We can sit and prepare for 'the end.' We can watch our Palestinian siblings suffer while throwing our hands in the air exclaiming 'What am I supposed to do!?' We can come up with all sorts of cliches about how our individual efforts are irrelevant to the climate emergency. We can keep tithing at parishes where clergy spew hate speech each Sunday…Or, we can choose love."

Ezra Doyle is a spiritual theologian fascinated by universal religious themes as found in various world traditions. He has an affinity for vegan cooking, the Book of Common Prayer, and calling people the title “friend.”

Catholic Women Preach

"Discerning God's Call" with Marisa Papula

Preaching for the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Marissa Papula offers a reflection on discerning God's call in our lives:

"I wonder when in our lives we receive invitations that turn everything upside down, and we’re left with little else to do then pick up our nets and leave it all behind for God: the job layoff, the positive pregnancy test, the diagnosis, the love at first sight. God’s call to us and our compulsion to respond might not involve a fishing boat on the Sea of Galilee. Still, it might very well involve the minutiae of our daily lives: parenthood, partnerships, jobs, the humanness of living in a body that is fragile and mortal. From within our lives but beyond our expectations and imaginations come invitations that compel us out of all we know and into a wilderness of holy surrender."

Marissa Papula (she/her) serves as the Director of Campus Ministry at Loyola Marymount University in California.Formed and transformed by Jesuit education, Marissa holds her BA from The University of Scranton, and her MA and Post Graduate Certificate in Spiritual Formation from Boston College. Her academic and pastoral interests, and subjects of her speaking, writing, and presenting include Ignatian spirituality, theological anthropology, feminist theology, racial justice and LGBTQ+ ministry.

January 23 at 7pm ET

How Everyday Americans (Don’t) Talk About Abortion with Tricia C. Bruce, Ph.D.

Using data from in-depth interviews with hundreds of everyday Americans, Sociologist Dr. Tricia Bruce underscores the imperative of productive conversations about abortion in a post Roe v. Wade era. Her research exposes the limitations of available labels, assumptions, and boundaries separating Americans' moral and legal views. Study insights help to forge pathways beyond polarization, making room for greater complexity, ambiguity, understanding, and cross-cutting collaborations.


Tricia C. Bruce, Ph.D. (University of California Santa Barbara) is a sociologist of religion with expertise in organizational, attitudinal, and generational change. Her award-winning books and reports include Parish and Place; Faithful Revolution; American Parishes; Polarization in the US Catholic Church; and How Americans Understand Abortion. Her writing has appeared in The Wall Street Journal; Time Magazine; Science Advances; Review of Religious Research; U.S. Catholic Historian; and more. She is President-Elect of the Association for the Sociology of Religion, Past-Chair of the American Sociological Association’s Sociology of Religion Section, and an affiliate of the University of Notre Dame’s Center for the Study of Religion and Society.

February 20 at 7pm ET

Co-Creating Beauty: Queer Bodies and Queer Loves Beyond the Anathemas with Craig Ford, Ph.D.

Dr. Ford's presentation, "Co-Creating Beauty: Queer Bodies and Queer Loves Beyond the Anathemas" explores how our roles as co-creators with God allows for new ways to understand the truth revealed by sexuality and gender identity beyond the boundaries of heteronormativity. Such redeployment of this theological status as co-creator, Ford argues, may provide a pathway beyond the impasse currently experienced at the level of official church teaching with respect to these topics.

Craig A. Ford, Jr., is Assistant Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Saint Norbert College, where he teaches courses in Christian Ethics, Ecclesiology, and on Race, Gender and Sexuality while also serving as Co-Director for the Peace and Justice Interdisciplinary Minor. He is also on the faculty at the Institute for Black Catholic Studies—hosted at Xavier University of Louisiana, the nation’s only Catholic HBCU— where he teaches courses on Black Theology as well as on Topics in Moral Theology from a Black Perspective. A graduate of the University of Notre Dame, Yale Divinity School, and Boston College, Dr. Ford writes on topics at the intersection of queer theory, blac studies, and the Catholic moral tradition. His most recent book project, All of Us: The Future of Catholic Theology From the Perspectives of Queer Theologians of Color is a co-edited volume with Bryan Massingale and Miguel Diaz, drawing scholars and activists from North and South America, the Pacific Islands, Australia, and Europe who seek to chart new directions for Catholic theology when the oppressive realities of racism, heteronormativity, and sexism within church and world are engaged equally and fiercely. This volume is currently under contract with Fortress Press.

February 29 at 7pm ET

Lenten Fasting and Body Hatred: A Feminist Critique with Jessica Coblentz, Ph.D.

Join us as Jessica Coblentz presents on her article “Catholic Fasting Literature in a Context of Body Hatred: A Feminist Critique” in which she argues that the social conditions of misogynistic body hatred and the culture of fasting during Lent perpetuates disordered eating.

Jessica Coblentz, Ph.D. is an assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies and Theology at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana, where her research and teaching focuses on Catholic systematic theology, feminist theologies, and mental health in theological perspective. She is a graduate of Santa Clara University and Harvard Divinity School, and received her PhD from Boston College. She was previously a resident scholar at the Collegeville Institute in Collegeville, Minnesota, and has taught at Saint Mary’s College in Moraga, California.

March 28 at 7pm ET

Consent in the Context of the Annunciation with Megan McCabe, Ph.D.

Join us as Megan McCabe, Ph.D. discusses building a culture of consent in the context of the Feast of the Annunciation. Dr. McCabe will speak on her work on sexual justice and social sin in the United States with a special emphasis on consent in the context of the Assumption.

Megan K. McCabe, Ph.D. is assistant professor of religious studies at Gonzaga Univeristy. She works in the areas of Catholic moral theology, theological ethics, and feminist theologies. Her research and teaching respond to questions of human responsibility for suffering and the correlative duties to work for social transformation. She engages questions at the intersection of moral theology, social ethics, liberation and political theologies, feminist theologies and ethics, and issues of gender and sexuality. Her current research develops an understanding of “cultures of sin,” specifically in the context of an examination of the problem of the cultural foundation of sexual violence.