Christianity
**The Gloria Purvis Podcast**

Too many voices are not being heard in the Catholic Church today. “The Gloria Purvis Podcast” is a new podcast from America Media hosted by radio personality and Catholic commentator, Gloria Purvis. The podcast centers the opinions, stories and experiences of individuals who have been marginalized in the Catholic Church and in society. A consistent ethic of life informs the conversations and honestly critiques narrow applications of Catholic teachings and ideological attitudes. It’s not liberal, it’s not conservative. It’s all about fostering a culture of charitable dialogue around the most complex and contentious issues in the Catholic Church today. It’s just Catholic. Episodes will release weekly.
Subscribe to hear the latest episodes and learn more at http://americamagazine.org/gloriapurvispodcast
Photo courtesy of Joseph Gloor/Word on Fire

Latest Episodes:

A Haitian immigrant will be the next bishop of Charleston Apr 19, 2022

Show notes

On May 13, 2022, Rev. Jacque Fabre will be ordained and installed as the new bishop of Charleston, South Carolina. His predecessor, Most Rev. Robert E Guglielmone, submitted his retirement to Pope Francis, as is custom at 75 years of age.

This is a historic appointment for many reasons. Bishop-elect Fabre will be the 14th bishop, but the first Black bishop, of the diocese of Charleston, which extends throughout the entire state of South Carolina. He will be one of a handful Black bishops in the United States. And an immigrant from Haiti.

But these are all labels Bishop-elect Fabre is weary of. “First Haitian, first black, what does that mean?” he says, “It might put you in a box and I hate to be in [a box.]” Although he concedes this is an important historical moment, “Yes. To have a person from a different country, different language, being part of the hierarchy of the states. It's a huge progress.”

“It's a sign that the church in the south,” Gloria says, “which has this tangled up history with Blackness, with Black people,” can realize, “Black is beautiful. Black is holy. Black is beloved by God.”

Bishop-elect Fabre is a member of the religious order the Missionaries of St. Charles, or Scalabrinian Fathers. He has served in many places — such as Cuba, Colombia, Rome and the Dominican Republic — and in a variety of roles. He speaks five languages including English, Spanish, Italian, French and Creole.

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What Catholics need to know about Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation Apr 12, 2022

Show notes

This week on “The Gloria Purvis Podcast,” Gloria speaks with Danielle Conway, Dean of Penn State Dickinson Law. Dean Conway is a leading voice on creating an anti-racist approach to legal education and has helped those who work in law schools around the country, including at Penn Law, develop better approaches for designing inclusive experiences.

With Gloria she discusses the historic bipartisan confirmation of Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, the key questions raised during the Senate hearings, and the personal significance of witnessing Judge Jackson’s family going “from segregation to the Supreme Court in just one generation.”

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Helpful terms:

Due Process

Reconstruction Amendments (13th, 14th, 15th Amendments)

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A theology of womanhood that preserves sex, but has fun with gender Mar 29, 2022

Show notes

In honor of Women’s History Month, “The Gloria Purvis Podcast” is exploring questions about what it means to be a woman, from a Catholic perspective. In this episode, Gloria speaks with Abigail Favale, an associate professor of English and the dean of the College of Humanities at George Fox University in Oregon. Abigail is the author of The Eclipse of Sex by the Rise of Gender and a related forthcoming book, The Genesis of Gender.

Abigail was raised in an evangelical Christian family, and her early childhood was steeped in traditional gender roles. But when she converted to Catholicism as a teenager, she soon discovered a more integrated theology of womanhood. Catholic theology focuses on the sacramentality of one’s being, rather than the Protestant notion of doing or gender role-playing. Abigail believes that our sexed bodies, male and female, have distinct and important roles to play in the sacramental life and that the erasure of sex poses a threat, most especially to women.

The physicality of being a woman became even more salient to Abigail through her experience of motherhood. “It still blows my mind to just think no matter what I’m doing, whether I am...breastfeeding a child or changing a tire or whatever, in that moment, I’m living out my sex in a way that is pointing to something divine.”

While there is much to be celebrated in feminism, Abigail says second-wave feminism led to the scapegoating of the female body. “Female fertility becomes the problem,” she says. “And so women physiologically need to almost be made male through birth control, and if that doesn't work, then the child becomes the scapegoat.”

Gloria and Abigail also break down the differing conceptions of sex and gender that are operating in political conversations today. They discuss the medicalization of transgender bodies, and Abigail points out the health hazards of prescribing cross-sex hormone therapy over the course of a lifespan. There’s an alternative approach, she says, that honors both the sacramental body without collapsing gender into what Abigail calls a “pornified costume” for women. And fortunately for Catholics, we have the example of the saints, many of whom were both gender atypical and holy.

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How Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson’s qualifications came under attack Mar 22, 2022

Show notes

This week on “The Gloria Purvis Podcast,” Gloria speaks with Angela Onwuachi-Willig, dean and professor of law at Boston University School of Law. Professor Onwuachi-Willig is a leading scholar of law and inequality, and her research centers on race, gender, employment discrimination, affirmative action and family law. With Gloria, she discusses the nomination of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court and the racism underpinning the negative reaction to President Biden’s announcement that the nominee would be a Black woman.

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The Catholic church shut its doors on Black Americans. But we can still be made new. Mar 15, 2022

Show notes

Chris Smith is the only African-American Jesuit in formation in the United States. But he comes from a multi-racial family and recently wrote an article for America, My white mom’s marriage to a Black man outraged my grandma. But she learned to love us.

Smith joins the Gloria Purvis Podcast to talk about his family’s legacy of love, racism, reconciliation and healing. They also discuss how the Catholic church actively shut the doors on African Americans in America and how this can be traced in his own paternal family line.

Although he’s witnessed plenty of generational racism, Smith testifies to the goodness of people, even when you can’t see it. It’s what he has witnessed in his own family and among the mostly older, white Catholics who welcomed him as a child into the faith. And it’s what leads him to the conviction that, “God can change any heart with love” and that we, the faithful, have to “let people be new” or evolve in their spiritual journeys.

Looking for a spiritual practice to help you see people anew? Smith says that you have to step out of your comfort zone. He regularly attends mass at a Ukrainian Greek Catholic church, although it bears little familiarity to his own incultured celebration of the faith. It’s there that he is challenged to appreciate the variety in the church and the possibility for us all to see things differently.

“If you are a liberal person and you can't stand traditional people on the internet” Smith urges, “go to a traditional parish [...] you’re going to find saints there.”

For a Church That is Unafraid to Welcome Black People

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Dred Scott’s descendant, Lynne Jackson, has a lot to teach us about racial reconciliation Mar 08, 2022

Show notes

“Our word isn’t racism. It’s relationship.” Those are the words of Lynne Jackson, the great great grand-daughter of Dred Scott. Lynne joins the Gloria Purvis Podcast to discuss the Dred Scott decision and its ripple effects today.

In 1852, Dred sued the state of Missouri for his freedom, invoking the law “once free always free” after living in the free state of Illinois. Ultimately, his case was denied by Chief Justice Roger Taney, who ruled by the changing political tide and pervading racism of the time.

Lynne Jackson founded the Dred Scott Heritage Foundation to commemorate her ancestor’s story, to continue education around racial justice, and to reconcile the descendants of formerly enslaved people with the descendants of slave-owners.

Jackson herself was able to meet the descendants of Roger Taney. And together they have spoken before colleges and legislatures, testifying to the impact of Scott’s historical case as it altered the course of U.S. history and continues to ring through the generations.

“I was just grateful that we had come to a point in our country where we could have of these two families speak together and know each other and respect each other,” says Jaconson, “And have a moment where we could say we aren't our ancestors and we want to see a better day for all of our children in our country.”

In addition to modeling racial reconciliation between families today, The Dred Scott Heritage Foundation raised $250,000 to commission the only statue of Dred Scott and his wife Harriet, which stand outside the Old Courthouse in St. Louis, Missouri.

There still is no postage stamp for Dred Scott. The Foundation started a Dred Scott Stamp Campaign to solicit required petitions and you can help by going to their website, www.dredscottlives.org and checking out the campaign.

Lynne Jackson is available for speaking engagements and can be reached through the website at info@thedredscottfoundation.org or 314-532-5613.

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Catholics need to hear anti-racist preaching at Mass. This is what that sounds like. Mar 01, 2022

Show notes

If you have not yet seen Sister Thea Bowman’s 1989 address to the U.S. bishops, pause whatever you’re doing and go watch it. And for any newly ordained U.S. bishop, this should be required viewing. That’s the conviction of Manuel Williams, C.R., a Resurrectionist priest, the pastor of Resurrection Catholic Church in Montgomery, Ala., and professor of Black Catholic spirituality.

Father Williams joins “The Gloria Purvis Podcast” to celebrate the tour de force who was his friend and mentor, Thea Bowman, F.S.P.A., who is now on the path to beatification and canonization. They discuss the importance of a distinctly Black spirituality, including song, preaching, art, worship and prayer in Catholic parishes and communities. Father Williams explains what anti-racist preaching means and why it matters at church.

“We have to acknowledge that the experience of Africanness that our ancestors brought to this country, the experience of the middle passage, the experience of enslavement, the experience of Jim Crow, the experience of the great migration, the experience now of voter oppression and renewed rancid racism—all of that affects the way I prayed to my Jesus,” Father Williams says, “and to deny that is nonsense.”

According to Father Williams, it is not the case that white spirituality doesn’t exist or have a home in the church but rather that the default spirituality has been white and has been assumed to be normative for everyone else. Anti-racist preaching and the full inclusion of Black spirituality takes seriously the mystery of the Incarnation, through which, Father Williams says, “every culture, every manifestation, every expression of humanity is honored, is glorified, is affirmed.” Father Williams adds that while the Incarnation affirms every culture, Jesus’ becoming human still takes place “in a concrete place, in a concrete time, in a concrete culture.” And therefore, we celebrate the Black experience as part of the concreteness of the Incarnation.

Gloria and Father Williams also talk about how Black Catholics can sustain themselves spiritually when their local parish does not draw from the cultural richness of the African American experience.

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Show Links:

Thea Bowman’s address to U.S. bishops: transcript and video

America Media’s short documentary: This historic Catholic parish fought to stay open—and won

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Wokism, prophetic anger, and the new appointment of Archbishop Shelton Fabre Feb 22, 2022

Show notes

Pope Francis has appointed Bishop Shelton Fabre as the next archbishop of Louisville, Ky. Bishop Fabre is one of two Black U.S. Catholics serving as archbishop, along with Cardinal Wilton Gregory, the archbishop of Washington, D.C. He comes to Louisville with years of pastoral experience, first as the auxiliary bishop of New Orleans from 2006 to 2013 and then the bishop of Houma-Thibodaux in Louisiana from 2013 to 2022.

Gloria Purvis welcomes Bishop Fabre to the podcast to discuss a range of issues affecting the church and Black Catholics today, most notably the sin of racism. Bishop Fabre calls this time “a watershed moment for our country [and] our church” and encourages those Catholics who don’t know how to have courageous conversations on race to visit their pastor first and share their desires to help and learn.

They also discuss the importance of listening sessions for Black Catholics experiencing prophetic anger in response to the evils of racism today. The bishop believes that both the work of justice and prayer have equal roles to play in the transformation of our society. “Laws have an important role to play in overcoming racism,” Bishop Fabre says, paraphrasing the Pontifical Council for Peace and Justice, “but laws alone will not change the human heart.”

Finally, Gloria and Bishop Fabre talk about what’s next for the U.S. Bishops’ Ad Hoc Committee Against Racism, which the bishop chairs.

Support “The Gloria Purvis Podcast” by getting a digital subscription to America magazine: www.americamagazine.org/subscribe.

Show Links:

Open Wide Our Hearts: The Enduring Call to Love - A Pastoral Letter Against Racism

America Media’s short documentary: This historic Catholic parish fought to stay open—and won

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How dating apps are impacting Catholic relationships Feb 15, 2022

Show notes

How should Catholics navigate modern dating apps? What does it take to make a marriage between people of faith work today? And what are some of the negative mythologies of marriage that are still alive and well? These are some of the questions tackled by Gloria and Dr. Mario Sacasa, a licensed marriage and family therapist and the associate director of the Faith and Marriage Apostolate of the Willwoods Community, in New Orleans, LA. In addition to his practice and ministry among Catholic couples, Dr. Sacasa creates and hosts the Always Hope Podcast which is a long-form interview show aimed at helping the listener grow in their emotional and spiritual health.

Support The Gloria Purvis Podcast by getting a digital subscription to America Magazine: www.americamagazine.org/subscribe

Links:

Dr. Sacasa’s Always Hope Podcast

Dr. Sacasa’s website

America Media’s short documentary: This historic Catholic parish fought to stay open—and won

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How people of faith should (and should not) think about depression Feb 08, 2022

Show notes

When it comes to depression, there are two popular schools of thought in Christian theology: suffering from depression is a result of human sinfulness, or it's a form of divine instruction. That is, either we’ve done something wrong or God is trying to teach us something. But neither approach has proved convincing to Jessica Coblentz, a Catholic theologian in the Department of Religious Studies and Theology at Saint Mary’s College at Notre Dame.

Gloria and Jessica discuss the findings of her new book, Dust in the Blood: A Theology of Life with Depression, which exposes the ways in which bad theology can further harm people suffering from depression, and offers healthy practices for accompaniment.

Support The Gloria Purvis Podcast by getting a digital subscription to America Magazine: www.americamagazine.org/subscribe

Links:

Jessica Coblentz’s book: Dust in the Blood: A Theology of Life with Depression

Watch America Media’s short documentary: This historic Catholic parish fought to stay open—and won

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