Steve Coats has reviewed PORTRAIT OF A PRIESTESS: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece for the New York Times. He says:

These are just some of the influential women visible through the cracks of conventional history in Joan Breton Connelly’s eye-opening “Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece.” Her portrait is not in fact that of an individual priestess, but of a formidable class of women scattered over the Greek world and across a thousand years of history, down to the day in A.D. 393 when the Christian emperor Theodosius banned the polytheistic cults. It is remarkable, in this age of gender studies, that this is the first comprehensive treatment of the subject, especially since, as Connelly persuasively argues, religious office was, exceptionally, an “arena in which Greek women assumed roles equal ... to those of men.” Roman society could make no such boast, nor can ours.

Click here to read the entire review.

[via DallesNews Religion]

The Perspective blog recently quoted William Barry, SJ's, thoughts on the ordination of women in the Roman Catholic Church. 

In the contemporary Catholic Church in the United States and elsewhere there are hundreds of women who identify with Therese's desire [to be a priest]. They feel that God has called them to ordained ministry in the church, and they find themselves unable to follow through on the Lord's call because of the stance of authority in the church .....

All my instincts, training and experience lead me to the conclusion that these women are experiencing an authentic call of God ..... All of us in the church need to take seriously the experiences of women such as I have described. Is God saying something to us about ministry in the church through them? And if so, what is he saying?

Click here to read the entire post. 

A missionary with twenty years experience in the Philippines recently listed ten reminders about spiritual direction. Here's number ten:

“Learning unsupported by grace may get into our ears; it never reaches the heart. It makes great noise outside but serves no inner purpose.”

Click here to see the first nine.

Forty enrichment, formation and training faculty and directors gathered at Wisdom House in Litchfield, Connecticut. Vivienne Joyce, SC and Janet Ruffing, RSM from Fordham University in New York presented “The Supervision and Practicum Element of Spiritual Director Formation: Uncovering Inherent Mutuality.”

Two new books are reviewed in the New York Times that argue the existance of God. One is written by a former believer and the other by a former athiest. Stanley Fish, dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago writes:

 

Perhaps an individual reader of either will have his or her mind changed, but their chief value is that together they testify to the continuing vitality and significance of their shared subject. Both are serious inquiries into matters that have been discussed and debated by sincere and learned persons for many centuries. The project is an old one, but these authors pursue it with an energy and goodwill that invite further conversation with sympathetic and unsympathetic readers alike.

In short, these books neither trivialize their subject nor demonize those who have a different view of it, which is more than can be said for the efforts of those fashionable atheist writers whose major form of argument would seem to be ridicule.

Click here to read his entire review.

Presbyterian pastor Jim Bonewald writes of the extraordinary ordinariness of Naaman, "the General Schwarzkopf of the Aramean Army."

 

 

Often it’s faithfulness to the common, everyday, ordinary things that God uses to work the extraordinary in our midst. So let’s work to pay better attention to those things, to listen, to be faithful so that we might begin to discern what it is that God wants to do with the ordinary in order to accomplish the extraordinary in our lives.

Click here to read the entire reflection.