WIT » Maria Gwyn McDowell

Every Sunday, a clergy friend pronounces God’s forgiveness before the corporate confession. In …

https://womenintheology.org/2024/03/01/beginning-with-forgiveness/

Abstaining from political and social advocacy is the privilege of those who benefit from the status quo, those whose position, power, and wealth is preserved by existing laws and policies. In the...

https://womenintheology.org/2022/10/04/silence-or-justice-the-church-and-politics/

Now, he has died. A gracious, thoughtful, articulate spokesperson for the best of Orthodoxy to an English-speaking audience has died.  I feel like one of the last hopes for a kind and gentle Ort...

https://womenintheology.org/2022/08/29/may-our-hope-not-die-with-you-metropolitan-kallistos-ware/

Liturgy makes us who we are, who we are called to be. It is deeply formative: the words we pray, the way we move our bodies, the stillness of the moment, the music that lingers well after the pre...

https://womenintheology.org/2022/08/02/making-community-with-music/

My brother clergy, before you publicly declare as white men that a text isn’t feminist, please, check your system. When the church, and the society in which the church finds itself, isn’t sex...

https://womenintheology.org/2022/07/13/mary-martha-and-feminism-check-your-systems/

I do not believe that as a priest, I should be in the business of binding the profligate abundance of God to a particular linear, cognitive, or traditional process. As a priest, I bind what I see...

https://womenintheology.org/2022/07/05/open-eucharist-a-habitual-binding-of-god/

Strategize. Shift the boundaries. Make new laws and revoke old ones. Vote, campaign, create local safe spaces that trickle up. Go read books that show just how slow social change is, and then spe...

https://womenintheology.org/2022/06/24/conjure-plan-debate-convince-justice-over-the-long-haul/

It may be that the gunmen who killed blacks in Buffalo and children …

https://womenintheology.org/2022/05/24/there-is-no-acting-alone-in-a-society-that-will-not-regulate-gun-ownership/

Katie Kelaidis, finally among Orthodox, broached the subject that it seems so many …

https://womenintheology.org/2022/05/06/the-cost-of-silence/

On this day, where in the Christian East Christ descends to the dead, and raises Adam and Eve as a representation of raising all people, male, female, and all those who travel between those two p...

https://womenintheology.org/2021/05/01/anointing-women/

Every church has a “back to Egypt” committee. I heard that this week, …

https://womenintheology.org/2021/03/14/leaving-egypt-a-sermon-on-looking-back/

This Saturday, August 29th, the Episcopal Diocese of Oregon will elect its 11th …

https://womenintheology.org/2020/08/26/discerning-through-bias-on-calling-the-11th-bishop-of-the-diocese-of-oregon/

While Oregon was never a slave-holding state, our economic success was significantly built on the labor of black and brown bodies. Innovations, like pre-paid healthcare, are developed when that l...

https://womenintheology.org/2020/07/06/the-stories-we-tell-progressive-rewriting-of-history/

We are troubled, and we live in troubled times, and maybe that trouble is the Spirit, moving, shaking, wandering, cracking open our illusions and prejudices, exposing our insides so that new life...

https://womenintheology.org/2020/06/02/be-troubled-by-the-spirit/

The implication is that sexually active same-sex intercourse is an enterprise characterized by an impersonal and utterly hedonistic lack of discipline. This is hardly a new analysis of same-sex s...

https://womenintheology.org/2019/09/16/fat-pills-and-sexbots-a-serious-orthodox-engagement-with-sexual-diversity/

I joined WIT in 2013 after writing as an Eastern Orthodox feminist for many years on my personal blog, DeiProfundis. I applied for two related reasons. First, in Eastern Orthodoxy, silence and is...

https://womenintheology.org/2019/06/13/why-i-write-for-wit-collaborative-public-theology-matters/

A sermon for Easter 2C, “Thomas Sunday,” on Acts 5:27-32 and John 20:19-31. …

https://womenintheology.org/2019/04/29/fear-and-resurrection-the-fear-of-the-jews-and-its-aftermath/

It isn’t the cross and the blood that is redemptive. It what the cross reveals about God in which we take joy. So, we will repeat the refrain of the first Anthem, we “praise and glorify your ...

https://womenintheology.org/2019/04/19/here-we-are-again-or-why-i-venerate-the-cross/

Which is all really just to say this: covering over an icon is like covering the face and eyes of your best friend, of a wise elder, of a comforting confessor, of a partner on the journey. We mus...

https://womenintheology.org/2019/04/15/being-seen/

But the language of hate is so incomplete. Because what’s happening is that the powers that be -- and in the United States, the powers that be are white supremacist and anti-black -- the powers...

https://womenintheology.org/2018/10/28/seeing-power-white-supremacy-or-jesus/

Sunday of the Transfiguration, August 5, 2018 at St. Philip the Deacon Episcopal …

https://womenintheology.org/2018/08/06/the-glory-of-being-fully-human/

I simply do not have the luxury of shocked liberal outrage over the choice of the U.S. government to interpret our law in such a way that terrorizes families because this is simply the long, hist...

https://womenintheology.org/2018/06/19/outrage-to-whom-are-we-responsible/

I noticed it as I rounded the corner to unlock the front door of the church. A white box next to the stop sign across the street. I gave it no second thought. A half an hour later, I was saying h...

https://womenintheology.org/2018/03/25/when-a-chest-is-a-coffin/

Christmas Day — December 25th, 2017 — the Rev. Maria McDowell from St. …

https://womenintheology.org/2017/12/25/there-is-no-end-to-gods-beginnings/

The violence we carry within us, the violence with which we respond to those around us, the violence on which our nation and world is built, all is judged in this story. Our hope lies not in a Go...

https://womenintheology.org/2017/10/15/the-good-king/