On a Mission

Today I’m talking with Katie Lacz. She works for Women’s Ordination Conference, the United States branch of a worldwide movement to urge the Roman Catholic Church to reform and welcome women into ordained ministry. Find more details at www.molleendupreedominguez.com

Did you ever come into prayer with so much heaviness, grief, or misery that you just couldn’t put it into words? You might just need Fran Pratt.

She’s my guest today. She’s known online at The Litanist. That is, she writes litanies. They’re beautiful articulations of emotion and truth, giving individuals and communities words to pray about hard stuff. They offer words when there are no words.

So many more details and fun facts await at molleendupreedominguez.com where you can also sign up for my weekly email newsletter, which contains prayer tools, cool stuff to read, and links to other progressive, faith-based stuff around the internet.

Today I’m talking with Cameron Bellm. About a year ago, she started publishing her writing on Instagram- and, y’all, it blew up! She started publishing prayers during the Pandemic of 2020… they resonated… and they were shared and repurposed all over the world. She collected those pandemic prayers in an ebook. And now she’s writing a hardcover book. It’s about paying attention as a spiritual practice and being a contemplative in action. It will be out in hard copy in March 2022.

She’s a writer, scholar, and mother who lives in the Seattle area. We talk about Russian literature, not needing to be God’s lawyer, and discerning what is ours to do. I think you’re going to love a sneak peek into the spirituality of such a sincere and thoughtful human being.

Find the information about this podcast at https://molleendupreedominguez.home.blog/podcast/

Today I’m talking with Brian Stanley, an education nonprofit executive living in Oakland. He’s a Black Catholic man raising two Black boys, along with his amazing wife, Celeste. Our conversation covers the ways his faith influences his quarantine, why he thinks White people are waking up to racist policies in the U.S. NOW, and his work in the educational nonprofit world.

Visit show notes at https://molleendupreedominguez.home.blog/2020/09/13/on-a-mission-season-two-is-back/

Gene Yang is a Bay Area native, author, and teacher. While teaching computer science at the Catholic high school where I now teach he also casually wrote an award-winning graphic novel, American Born Chinese. It was a finalist for the National Book Award in the category of young people’s literature. It did win many awards outright. Let me list them: the 2007 Michael L. Printz Award, the 2007 Eisner Award for Best Graphic Album: New, the Publishers Weekly Comics Week Best Comic of the Year, the San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year, the 2006/2007 Best Book Award from The Chinese American Librarians Association, and Amazon.com Best Graphic Novel/Comic of the Year. He also received the MacArthur fellowship in 2016.

Dr. Kellie McElhaney is the founding director of the Center for Equity, Gender, and Leadership at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business. She started her career in banking, which she calls a heavily masculine industry, where women were compelled to exercise leadership in a masculine way. She is fighting the good fight in the corporate world to insist that yes - welcoming different skill sets, different personalities, different genders, and different ethnicities into the board room is not just a nice thing to do, but that it’s in fact good for the bottom line. She’s the author of a book called Just Good Business.

Did you ever inherit money? Did you wish you did? This podcast is the story of what my friend Rose Feerick did when she inherited a bunch of money after college graduation. How do we face and deal with our wealth when we call ourselves Christians? When you inherit a bunch of money - would you invest it for your progeny? Would you give it all away? Rose offers a third way - how Jesus!

Now she’s the co-director of the organization, Wisdom and Money.

She offers a way of participating with money that is grounded in meditative practice, open heartedness, and a deep understanding of God.

Today is a great for you, dear listener. Today I have the privilege of talking with Dr. Emily Reimer-Barry, associate professor of Theology and Religious Studies at University of San Diego. If you read my blog, you may recognize her name as someone who presented at Catholic Theological Society of America’s conference last summer - and received a standing ovation.

Today it’s Xouhoa Bowen. She is an activist, former PeaceCorps volunteer, and the founder and CEO of Community Impact Lab, a nonprofit organization in my neighborhood dedicated to taking action and to expanding opportunities for everyone, especially women and children. She’s a mom and talks about how becoming a mom made her more fierce in what she wants and expects. We got into it feminist-mom-wise, which I did not expect.

She’s dynamic, energetic, and ambitious. I just love talking with her and being around her. Listen in!

On today’s episode we chat with Anne Symens-Bucher, co-visionary behind Oakland, California’s Canticle Farm, a Franciscan-inspired community of activists, families and other folks growing food, sharing with the neighborhood, and building community. Our conversation went in a bunch of different directions - we ended up talking about the Enneagram, being White women, as well as how to persist in activism decade after decade. Listen in.