2021 Christine Schenk, CSJ Award for Young Catholic Leaders Recipient: FutureChurch presents Chloe Becker with the 2021 Christine Schenk Award for Young Catholic Leaders in recognition of her commitment to creating art that lifts up the lives of underrepresented saints and Catholics of color and calls on all Catholics to engage in the work of racial justice. Chloe Becker is a recent graduate of Magnificat High School in Rocky River, Ohio and a member of the Harvard University Class of 2025. Currently taking a “gap year,” Chloe has created all of the art for FutureChurch’s Women Witnesses for Racial Justice series. Chloe offers remarks following the presentation of the award.
Keynote Presenter: Massimo Faggioli, PhD is a leading authority on the history and administrative inner workings of the Catholic Church with specific expertise in the papacy, Vatican II, the Roman Curia, liturgical reform, new Catholic movements and on Catholicism and global politics. He is Professor of Theology and Religious Studies at Villanova University (Philadelphia) and a much published author and commentator. Professor Faggioli is one of the foremost scholars on the intersection of American Catholicism and the state of democracy in the United States. He examines and charts both the impact and potential threats to democratic ideals as our increasingly “unique” brand of American Catholicism, embraced by a majority of U.S. Bishops and funded by weathly conservative donors, is wedded to a democracy increasing invested in free wheeling capitalism that eschews social safety networks.
As Pope Francis traveled to Slovakia in 2021, Sr. Miriam Therese Winter joined FutureChurch and the Women’s Ordination Conference to recall the ministry and life of Ludmila Javorová, a woman who was ordained a Roman Catholic priest by Bishop Felix Davidek to serve in the underground church there when the church was under threat by the Communist regime from 1948 through 1989. Learn about her life, ministry, and why she is important as the world follows Francis to Slovakia.
FutureChurch welcomes Dr. Nontando Hadebe and other contributors to the book, A Time Like No Other: Covid-19 in Women’s Voices, published by the Circle of Concerned African Women Theologians, for a preview of their work.
In today’s Bibles, Lazarus has two sisters, Mary and Martha. But poring over hundreds of hand-copied early Greek and Latin manuscripts of the Gospel, Schrader found the name Martha had been altered. The scribes scratched out one Greek letter and replaced it with another, thereby changing the original name “Mary” to read “Martha.” They then split one woman into two. Schrader argues that the Mary of the original text is Mary Magdalene, not Martha or Martha’s sister, Mary. The two sisters belong to another story, in the Gospel of Luke, that is not repeated in John’s Gospel.
Elizabeth Schrader is a Ph.D. candidate in Early Christianity at Duke University. Her research interests include the New Testament Gospels, the Nag Hammadi corpus, Mary Magdalene, textual criticism, and feminist theology. She holds an M.A. and an S.T.M. from the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church. Her work about the potential suppression of Mary Magdalene was published in the Harvard Theological Review and featured by both the Daily Beast and Religion News Service.
Schrader has focused her research on the way Mary Magdalene’s role was deliberately downplayed by biblical scribes to minimize her importance. Specifically, she looks at the story of the raising of Lazarus told in the Gospel of John. In today’s Bibles, Lazarus has two sisters, Mary and Martha.
FutureChurch’s Women Witnesses for Racial Justice series continues with a celebration on the Solemnity of the Assumption, honoring the power and creativity of women – particularly women of color. Presider: Vickey McBride Witness: Naudia Loftis Readers: Crystal Catalan and Rose Lue Music reprinted and streamed under ONE LICENSE #A-737115.
Hebrew Bible Scholar, Rev. Wil Gafney., Ph.D., argues that the overwhelming majority of Christians receive their scripture mediated through a lectionary. Lectionaries are not simply as androcentric as are the scriptures, but women are even less well represented than they are in the biblical text. To the degree that biblical texts function as scripture for religious readers, it ought to be possible to tell the story of God and God’s people through the most marginalized characters in the text. Though the bible is an androcentric document steeped in patriarchy, a women’s lectionary should demonstrate and grapple with the gender constructs of the text rather than romanticize heroines.
FutureChurch celebrates the 2021 Feast of St. Mary of Magdala. Our virtual liturgy, “Mary of Magdala and Many Others: A Global Celebration of Catholic Women,” was led by Lucy Rieger with preaching from Kayla August. Read by FutureChurch participants from all over the world, our “Litany of Naming” helped us learn about seven Catholic women engaged in amazing ministries and provided participants an opportunity to lift their own names.
