Catholic Women Preach Book
FutureChurch Book Launch Celebration
Catholic Women Preach: Raising Voices, Renewing the Church, Cycle A
Elizabeth Donnelly and Russ Petrus, Editors
with Foreword by Sr. Barbara Reid, OP
2022 | Orbis Books
Emerging from the ground-breaking website, Catholic Women Preach, a project of FutureChurch, comes this new collection of reflections on the readings for Sundays and other feast days, offering an invaluable resource for weekly meditation, an inspiration for homilists, and an aid to enriching the church with diverse voices and experiences.
Published by Orbis Books, this first of three volumes of Catholic Women Preach: Raising Voices, Renewing the Church covers Cycle A of the liturgical calendar and opens with an energizing foreword by Sr. Barbara Reid, OP, one of the world’s leading scholars in feminist interpretation of the Scriptures.
Other contributors include African theologian and gender justice advocate, Nontando Hadebe; Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient, Sr. Simone Campbell, SSS; esteemed womanist and Black Catholic theologian, M. Shawn Copeland; acclaimed author and speaker, Sr. Joan Chittister, OSB; and executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, Sr. Norma Pimentel, MJ.
Together, the sixty-four contributors represent an extraordinary range of voices – religious and lay, scholars, activists, and pastoral leaders of every age and ethnicity.
Cover Art by Laura James
Mary Magdalene Proclaims Resurrection! (c) 2021 by Laura James/Rita Houlihan is one of a series four panels created by Laura James based on John 20. The series was commissioned by Rita L. Houlihan for FutureChurch with the goal of helping to reclaim the true story of Mary Magdalene as Apostle of the Apostles.
This panel depicts Mary Magdalene in the upper room, having already interacted with the Risen Christ and commissioned by him to “go and tell” the others, proclaiming – for the first time – the Good News of Resurrection.
The inscription, taken from A Women’s Lectionary for the Whole Church by the Rev. Wilda C. Gafney, Ph.D. (Church Publishing, 2021) reads, “Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, ‘I have seen the Savior’; and she told them he had said these things to her.”
The other three panels in the series are Called By Name, Jesus Commissions Mary Magdalene, and Pentecost: Jesus Sends Them Out. The four panels were recently exhibited as part of Black is Blessed: The Art of Laura James at The Sheen Center for Thought and Culture in the Archdiocese of New York.