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Educational Opportunities Tours
Deacon Kevin Bagley will be our featured speaker on our 2021 Deacon Couples Valentine Week Retreat at Sea.
During our 6-night Valentine’s cruise from Miami on the Royal Caribbean Empress of the Seas, we’ll join together for Morning Prayer before exploring the exciting ports of Key West, Puerto Costa Maya, and Cozumel, Mexico. On our two days at sea in the Western Caribbean, we’ll have time to relax poolside, meet deacon couples from around the country, and enjoy prayer and inciteful retreat talks by Deacon Kevin.
Originally ordained for the Archdiocese of Baltimore, Deacon Kevin currently serves in the Diocese of Dallas/Fort Worth and nationally through Bagley Ministries which provides continuing formation opportunities for parish staffs and catechetical leaders, and parish missions and retreats. Regarded as an outstanding public speaker, homilist, educator, and retreat master, Deacon Kevin has been a featured presenter at the National Association of Diaconate Directors Conferences; the National Catholic Educators Conference (NCEA), and the National Conference for Catechetical Leadership (NCCL).
Deacon Kevin currently serves as Director of Faith Formation and Evangelization and Parish Deacon at St. Andrew Catholic Church in Fort Worth, Texas where he is an adjunct professor at the University of Dallas - Neuhoff School of Ministry. He is also a featured writer for Deacon Digest.
Deacon Bagley earned a Doctorate in Ministry from The Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C. with a specialization in Liturgy and Sacramental Theology. He earned a Master’s Degree in Theology, specializing in biblical studies, from the Ecumenical Institute of Theology at Saint Mary’s Seminary and University in Baltimore.
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Joy as an Act of Resistance: The Essential Wisdom of Brenda Myers-Powell
I first met my friend Brenda Myers-Powell fifteen years ago, when we served as board members at the Chicago Alliance Against Sexual Exploitation. Brenda was then, as now, equal parts insightful, profound and profane, a self-described activist, nonprofit founder, prostitution survivor and “bad-ass motherfucker” (not necessarily in that order). She wears her identities the way she wears her enviable wig collection—no one rocks a blonde bob quite like Brenda— bringing just the right amount of “watch me” to everything she does. The word I most associate with Brenda is expansive. “They kept telling me to stay in my lane,” she said to me recently, “But my life is a freeway.”
One of Brenda’s great gifts is her ability to be political, in the truest sense of that word, but never partisan or polemical. She does not do cliché or movement-speak; she is uninterested in spinning her story to appeal specifically to any one audience. She is completely, consistently herself. The co-founder of the Dreamcatcher Foundation, a Chicago organization fighting sex trafficking, Brenda understands that there are systems that are too broken to be rebuilt, and shows up ready for the teardown—something I saw firsthand in a recent meeting with Mayor Lightfoot’s office, focused on the city’s failure to protect its Black girls.
Brenda’s new memoir, “Leaving Breezy Street,” is a beautiful, brutal account of her years in the sex trade, her journey out of “the life,” and her second act as a nationally recognized anti-trafficking activist. It’s a book that balances hard truths about growing up poor, Black and female in Chicago with the hope that is inherent in Brenda’s extraordinary life story.
Playing against survival-memoir type, “Leaving Breezy Street” is also deeply, genuinely funny. Whether musing on the proper place for a pimp at the Million Man march, or passing on one of her grandmother’s witticisms—“I’m too o
Editorial: Stop censoring, have a civil discussion
In September, NCR and GSR have reported on three tales of Catholic thinkers censored — Jesuit Fr. James Martin; Boston College theology professor M. Shawn Copeland; and Rebecca Bratten Weiss, co-founder of the New Pro-Life Movement. The excruciating irony of these tales begins with the fact that it no longer requires an edict from the Holy Office or a word of disapproval from the local bishop to silence thought and to pronounce someone persona non grata.
The mechanics have gone digital for sidelining someone like Martin, whose rather mild suggestions in his latest book, Building a Bridge, which urges a kinder church approach to the LGBT community, have stirred the hornet's nest of homophobia. Bratten Weiss was branded as insufficiently pro-life for suggesting the life agenda can and should include issues of women's rights, health care and violence. Word from Madonna University is the decision for Copeland not to speak was mutual, out of fear the situation would get "uglier."
It no longer takes the time it once did for tiny minorities to derail careers by slandering anyone who asks inconvenient questions. Once upon a time, such groups at least had to make the effort to send actual letters to faraway offices in Rome. They at least had to have some pull with officials there who would mistakenly construe a few dozen missives to mean the Catholic population of an entire country was up in arms.
Way back in the mid- to late-20th century, it took time for the wheels of censure to begin turning — and there was at least the appearance of a process. All it takes now is the gangs of cyberbullies with laptops, email lists and Twitter feeds, acting in the anonymity of the ether, to execute campaigns of hate in the flash of nanoseconds.
Make no mistake, however, the antecedents were well-set in those plodding bureaucracies of a previous age. The issues and the language of tod “Elizabeth Cady Stanton” by Robert Lentz
A vision of equality that inspired people “through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall” is celebrated as a holy feast day on July 20. Four 19th-century American women reformers -- Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer. Sojourner Truth, and Harriet Tubman -- are honored on this date in the Episcopal calendar of saints.
All advocated abolition of slavery as well as women’s rights. The first Women’s Rights Convention ended on July 20, in 1848 in Seneca Falls, NY.
President Obama made connections between women’s liberation, LGBT equality and African American civil rights in a famous line from his 2013 inaugural speech: “We, the people, declare today that the most evident of truths, that all of us are created equal, is the star that guides us still, just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls, and Selma, and Stonewall,” he said.
Stanton used similar language based on the Declaration of Independence when she wrote the American Declaration of Rights and Sentiments signed by attendees at Seneca Falls, including this line: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.”
A portrait of Elizabeth Cady Stanton is one of 40 icons featured in “Christ in the Margins” by Robert Lentz, is a Franciscan friar known for his innovative and LGBT-positive icons, and Edwina Gateley.
Stanton (1815–1902) was a leader of the early women’s rights movement and one of the organizers of the Seneca Falls conference. Her faith led her to critique the church itself for degrading and discriminating against women.
Raised in the Presbyterian Church, she was outraged by the exclusion of women Bible scholars in the 1870 revision of the King James Bible by an all-male committee, so she founded a committee of women to write the landmark 1895 commentary “The Woman’s Bible.” The controversial wor