If Nuns Ruled the World

Author: Jo Piazza
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453287647
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
“Fascinating profiles” of remarkable nuns, from an eighty-three-year-old Ironman champion to a crusader against human trafficking (Daily News [New York]). “In an age of villainy, war and inequality, it makes sense that we need superheroes,” writes Nicholas Kristof of The New York Times. “And after trying Superman, Batman and Spider-Man, we may have found the best superheroes yet: Nuns.” In If Nuns Ruled the World, veteran reporter Jo Piazza overthrows the popular perception of nuns as killjoy schoolmarms, instead revealing them as the most vigorous catalysts of change in an otherwise repressive society. Meet Sister Simone Campbell, who traversed the United States challenging a Congressional budget that threatened to severely undermine the well-being of poor Americans; Sister Megan Rice, who is willing to spend the rest of her life in prison if it helps eliminate nuclear weapons; and the inimitable Sister Jeannine Gramick, who is fighting for acceptance of gays and lesbians in the Catholic Church. During a time when American nuns are often under attack from the very institution to which they devote their lives—and the values of the institution itself are hotly debated—these sisters offer thought-provoking and inspiring stories. As the Daily Beast put it, “Anybody looking to argue there is a place for Catholicism in the modern world should just stand on a street corner handing out Piazza’s book.”

If Nuns Ruled the World

Author: Jo Piazza
Publisher: Open Road Media Books
ISBN: 9781497601901
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Profiles ten nuns and the causes to which they've dedicated their lives. Meet, for instance, Sister Simone Campbell, who traversed the United States challenging a Republican budget that threatened to severely undermine the well-being of poor Americans; Sister Megan Rice, who's willing to spend the rest of her life in prison if it helps eliminate nuclear weapons; and the inimitable Sister Jeannine Gramick, who's fighting for acceptance of gays and lesbians in the Catholic Church.

Agatha of Little Neon

Author: Claire Luchette
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374721300
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 207

Book Description
A National Book Foundation "5 Under 35" Honoree “An enchanting, sparkling book about the many meanings of sisterhood.” —Kristin Iversen, Refinery29 Claire Luchette's debut, Agatha of Little Neon, is a novel about yearning and sisterhood, figuring out how you fit in (or don’t), and the unexpected friends who help you find your truest self Agatha has lived every day of the last nine years with her sisters: they work together, laugh together, pray together. Their world is contained within the little house they share. The four of them are devoted to Mother Roberta and to their quiet, purposeful life. But when the parish goes broke, the sisters are forced to move. They land in Woonsocket, a former mill town now dotted with wind turbines. They take over the care of a halfway house, where they live alongside their charges, such as the jawless Tim Gary and the headstrong Lawnmower Jill. Agatha is forced to venture out into the world alone to teach math at a local all-girls high school, where for the first time in years she has to reckon all on her own with what she sees and feels. Who will she be if she isn’t with her sisters? These women, the church, have been her home. Or has she just been hiding? Disarming, delightfully deadpan, and full of searching, Claire Luchette’s Agatha of Little Neon offers a view into the lives of women and the choices they make.

The Last Catholic in America

Author: John R. Powers
Publisher: Loyola Press
ISBN: 0829430075
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 312

Book Description
"It is fast-moving and often downright funny."—New York Times "He has recaptured childish innocence and presented it with adult enlightenment—plus a touch of cynicism—yet never with irreverence." —Book-of-the-Month Club News First confession and its terrors. Eighty-four first graders in a classroom ruled by just one nun. The agony and the ecstasy of Lent. The dubious honor of being declared the worst altar server ever. Dinah Shore and the Blessed Virgin haunting your dreams. This is Eddie Ryan's world as he grows up in the intensely Catholic world of South-Side Chicago's St. Bastion's parish in the 1950s. In this classic coming-of-age novel, John Powers draws readers into Eddie Ryan's world with deep affection and bittersweet humor.

How to be Married

Author: Jo Piazza
Publisher: Harmony
ISBN: 0451495551
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
At age thirty-four, Jo Piazza got her romantic-comedy ending when she met the man of her dreams on a boat in the Galápagos Islands and was engaged three months later. But before long, Jo found herself riddled with questions. How do you make a marriage work in a world where you no longer need to be married? How does an independent, strong-willed feminist become someone's partner -- all the time? Journalist and author Jo Piazza writes a memoir of a real first year of marriage that will forever change the way we look at matrimony. A travel editor constantly on the move, Jo journeys to twenty countries on five continents to figure out what modern marriage means. Throughout this personal narrative, she gleans wisdom from matrilineal tribeswomen, French ladies who lunch, Orthodox Jewish moms, Swedish stay-at-home dads, polygamous warriors, and Dutch prostitutes. How to Be Married offers an honest portrait of a couple. When life throws more at them than they ever expected -- a terrifying health diagnosis, sick parents to care for, unemployment -- they ultimately create a fresh understanding of what it means to be equal partners during the good and bad times.

The Nones Are Alright

Author: Oakes, Kaya
Publisher: Orbis Books
ISBN: 1608336239
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Book Description

Charlotte Walsh Likes To Win

Author: Jo Piazza
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 1501179438
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
From bestselling author Jo Piazza comes one of People’s “Best Summer Books,” a “comically accurate” (New York Post) novel about what happens when a woman wants it all—political power, marriage, and happiness. Charlotte Walsh is running for Senate in the most important race in the country during a midterm election that will decide the balance of power in Congress. Reeling from a presidential election that shocked and divided the country and inspired to make a difference, she’s left her high-powered job in Silicon Valley and returned, with her husband and three young daughters, to her downtrodden Pennsylvania hometown to run for office in the Rust Belt state. Once the campaign gets underway, Charlotte is blindsided by just how dirty her opponent is willing to fight, how harshly she is judged by the press and her peers, and how exhausting it becomes to navigate a marriage with an increasingly ambivalent and often resentful husband. When the opposition uncovers a secret that could threaten not just her campaign but everything Charlotte holds dear, she must decide just how badly she wants to win and at what cost. “The essential political novel for the 2018 midterms” (Salon), Charlotte Walsh Likes to Win is an insightful portrait of what it takes for a woman to run for national office in America today. In a dramatic political moment like no other with more women running for office than ever before, this searing, suspenseful story of political ambition, marriage, class, sexual politics, and infidelity is timely, engrossing, and perfect for readers on both sides of the aisle.

The Nuns of Sant'Ambrogio

Author: Hubert Wolf
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0385351925
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 557

Book Description
A true, never-before-told story—discovered in a secret Vatican archive—of sex, poison, and lesbian initiation rites in a nineteenth-century convent. In 1858, a German princess, recently inducted into the convent of Sant’Ambrogio in Rome, wrote a frantic letter to her cousin, a confidant of the Pope, claiming that she was being abused and feared for her life. What the subsequent investigation by the Church’s Inquisition uncovered were the extraordinary secrets of Sant’Ambrogio and the illicit behavior of the convent’s beautiful young mistress, Maria Luisa. Having convinced those under her charge that she was having regular visions and heavenly visitations, Maria Luisa began to lead and coerce her novices into lesbian initiation rites and heresies. She entered into a highly eroticized relationship with a young theologian known as Padre Peters—urging him to dispense upon her, in the privacy and sanctity of the confessional box, what the two of them referred to as the “special blessing.” What emerges through the fog of centuries is a sex scandal of ecclesiastical significance, skillfully brought to light and vividly reconstructed in scholarly detail. Offering a broad historical background on female mystics and the cult of the Virgin Mary, and drawing on written testimony and original documents, Professor Wolf—Germany’s leading scholar of the Catholic Church, and among the very first scholars to be granted access to the archives of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, formerly the office of the Inquisition—tells the incredible story of how one woman was able to perpetrate deception, heresy, seduction, and murder in the heart of the Church itself.

The Nun

Author: Simonetta Agnello Hornby
Publisher: Europa Editions
ISBN: 1609459105
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 292

Book Description
Winner of the Italian PEN Prize: A tale of illicit love and a girl forced into a convent in the early nineteenth century. 1839, Messina, Italy: Agata is the daughter of an aristocrat, albeit an impoverished one, and she has fallen in love with wealthy Giacomo Lepre. Their families, however, view their romance as unacceptable and tawdry—and when Agata’s father dies, her mother decides to ferry her daughter far away, to Naples, where she hopes to garner a stipend from the king. The only boat leaving Messina that day is captained by young Englishman James Garson. Following a tempestuous passage to Naples, during which Agata confesses her troubles to James, Agata and her mother find themselves rebuffed by the king, and Agata is forced to join a convent. The Benedictine monastery of San Giorgio Stilita is rife with rancor and jealousy, illicit passions and ancient feuds. But Agata remains aloof, devoting herself to the cultivation of medicinal herbs, calmed by the steady rhythms of monastic life. She reads all the books James sends her and follows the news of the various factions struggling to bring unity to Italy. She has accepted her life as a nun, but she is divided between her yearnings for purity and religiosity and her desire to be part of the world. And she is increasingly torn when she realizes that her feelings for James, though he is only a distant presence in her life, have eclipsed those for Lepre . . . “Hornby enriches her story with sensuous details of food, fashion, furnishings, and the rules of an extravagant society, savoring local color and personality quirks.” —Publishers Weekly “An historical novel, a coming-of-age novel, a perfect portrait of family dynamics, The Nun also gives us, in Agata, an unforgettable heroine.” —Gazzetta di Mantova

Millennial Nuns

Author: The Daughters of Saint Paul
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982158034
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Book Description
More and more people-- especially millennials-- are turning to religion as a source of comfort and solace in our increasingly chaotic world. Rather than live a cloistered life of seclusion, the Daughters of Saint Paul actively embrace social media to evangelize, collectively calling themselves the #MediaNuns. In this collective memoir, eight of these Sisters share their own discernment journeys, struggles and crises of faith that they have overcome, and episodes from their daily lives. They offer practical takeaways and tips for living a more spiritually-fulfilled life, no matter your religious affiliation. -- adapted from jacket