Catholic Women Preach

"Jesus' Chosen Family" with Lisa Fullam

Preaching for the Feast of the Holy Family, Lisa Fullam offers a reflection on nurturing our own holy family:

"Family is a spiritual thing, a gift of God. As we live into those close relationships in our lives we should find ourselves growing in kindness, bending when people need bending with, forgiving when people need forgiving. We will be imperfect. We will make mistakes—we are still human, after all. So likewise, our holy family members will grow in kindness in return, bend with us when we need it, forgive us when we need it, and join us in our work for justice. THAT’S what family means, at least for Jesus and his mother, and all the members of Jesus’ chosen family, and for us as members of Jesus’ chosen family."

Lisa Fullam D.V.M., Th.D. is professor emerita of moral theology from the Jesuit School of Theology of Santa Clara University and associate veterinarian at New Baltimore Animal Hospital in West Coxsackie, NY. After veterinary studies at Cornell, she earned a doctorate in Christian ethics from Harvard Divinity School. After 19 years at JST-SCU, she and her husband John R. Mabry packed up their house and their boxer dogs and headed to the upper Hudson Valley in NY where she resumed veterinary practice.

The Just Word

"Living in the Likeness of Mary" with Elizabeth Gross

Today Elizabeth Gross invites us to explore “living in the likeness of Mary” through attentiveness to our ancestral and collective suffering; engage Catholic traditions of hermitage and contemplation to aid our spiritual and communal needs; and embody these ideas with a contemplation on our creativity, and the example of Hildegard von Bingen.

"As a society met with insurmountable suffering and much need for repair, we must shift our ideas of what 'living in the likeness of Mary' means, so that we are not solely expected to birth physical children as our ancestors were, but also new realities."

Elizabeth Gross is a cradle Catholic from Flushing, Queens who found her way back to Catholicism as an adult by centering the mystical and contemplative teachings, practices and experiences steeped within the tradition. Her background in yoga and Buddhism also greatly influences her spiritual praxis. Elizabeth teaches and writes about ecofeminism, herbalism, holistic reproductive and sexual healthcare, end of life care, and contemplative spirituality. Her BA is in both Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies and Italian Cultural Studies from SUNY New Paltz. You can learn more about her work at www.selkiemedicinals.com.

Catholic Women Preach

"Holding and Living a Message of Peace" with Michelle Sherman

January 16 at 7pm ET

African American Readings of Paul with Lisa Marie Bowens, Ph.D.

Lisa Marie Bowens' ground breaking book, African American Readings of Paul: Reception, Resistance, and Transformation (Eerdmans 2020), is the first book to investigate a historical trajectory of how African Americans have understood Paul and utilized his work to resist and protest injustice and racism in their own writings from the 1700s to the mid-twentieth century. In her text, Dr. Bowens takes a historical, theological, and biblical approach to explore interpretations of Paul within African American communities over the past few centuries. She surveys a wealth of primary sources from the early 1700s to the mid-twentieth century, including sermons, conversion stories, slave petitions, and autobiographies of ex-slaves, many of which introduce readers to previously unknown names in the history of New Testament interpretation. Along with their hermeneutical value, these texts also provide fresh documentation of Black religious life through wide swaths of American history. African American Readings of Paul promises to change the landscape of Pauline studies and fill an important gap in the rising field of reception history.

Lisa Marie Bowens, PhD, associate professor of New Testament at Princeton Theological Seminary, earned a BS (cum laude), MSBE, and MLIS from the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, an MTS and ThM from Duke Divinity School, and a PhD from Princeton Theological Seminary. She is the first African American woman to earn tenure in Princeton Seminary’s Bible department. Her research interests include Paul and apocalyptic literature, Pauline anthropology, Pauline epistemology, discipleship in the gospels, African American Pauline Hermeneutics, and New Testament exegesis and interpretation. She is a member of the Society of Biblical Literature, the Society of Pentecostal Studies, Society for the Study of Black Religion, American Academy of Religion, and a past Fund for Theological Education fellow. Her current projects include working as a contributor and co-editor with Scot McKnight and Joseph Modica on Preaching Romans From Here: Diverse Voices Engage Paul’s Most Famous Letter (forthcoming), contributor and co-editor with Dennis Edwards on Do Black Lives Matter?: How Christian Scriptures Speak to Black Empowerment, and two commentaries, one on 2 Corinthians and one on 1-2 Thessalonians.

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.