Joan Chittister

Listen: Being a woman in the Catholic Church, a nun who insists on asking difficult questions and holding those in power to account for what they say and do, can make for a sometimes lonely, difficult life. So why does Sister Joan stay?

Listen: In this episode Sr. Joan Chittister describes how she came to understand the significance of other traditions. Her understanding of the world's wisdom carries practical implications for each of us.
 

Listen: Sr. Joan Chittister still feels the negative effects of being a woman in the Catholic Church, but she also thinks on many levels and in society, things have changed for the better.
 

Childhood memories became a significant force behind Sr. Joan Chittister's relentless advocacy for women in all circumstances, in the church, in society, across cultures.
 

Listen: Sister Joan recounts an incident of struggle in her early life and the lifelong insights that emerged from it.

Listen: Sr. Joan Chittister takes us from her experience of God as a youngster alone in a church to her rejection of the all-male stereotype of a God imagined by men, to a God that cannot fit into convenient descriptions.

What kind of leadership will we get? Whatever it is, we must always remember that in a democracy, we put the leaders there ourselves and so we must save it ourselves, as well.

Listen: Sr. Joan Chittister talks with Sr. Valerie Luckey, a 36-year-old who entered the Erie Benedictines in 2016. The two provide a look at where tradition sparks and a new, engaging future emerges.

Listen: The much smaller and aging corps of women religious may suggest that this way of religious life is over. "Wrong," says Sr. Joan Chittister, in episode 3 of her podcast, "Risking the Questions."
 

Listen: Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister has a reputation as one who dares to ask big, bold questions. Explore them with her in this podcast conversation with her friend and biographer, former NCR editor Tom Roberts.

"Until a world at peace refuses to be warmakers, our own lives are in danger of dying for what we have created," Sr. Joan Chittester writes. 

It's not about fatigue or danger or age and endurance, writes Sr. Joan Chittister. It's about doing what we each need to do to help one another profit the whole country, the whole globe.

We are, it seems, not asking the right questions, argues Sr. Joan Chittister. Which means that we will therefore be without the answers we need to save the entire country.

Everyone who met Bishop Gumbleton left with an understanding that the world was his congregation and you were simply lucky to have found your way to the center of it.

Despite years of intermittent warfare between the Palestinians and Israel, we have hoped that simple decency, public morality, honest governments and personal conscience would sweep down, writes Joan Chittister. 

As Americans waste our civil duties, the question has become whether the country itself has simply collapsed any and all moral standards. Benedictine Sr. Joan Chittister asks: Who tricked us out of ourselves?

Life, the ancients knew, all depends on our willingness to collaborate, to do the things together that are important for us all. That's something we need to remember in this time of agitation and uncertainty.

The last time the church said it was going to make changes was in 1965, but all the changes to be seen were basically meaningless ones. This time, though, the faithful themselves are part of the agenda-making process.

Why are sensible, educated, moral adults allowing the so-called political leaders in this country to go on enabling the militarization of what has always seen itself as a peaceful society?

While our cars are getting faster and better every year, our ideas, our feelings, our insights and our freedom of belief are getting less and less important.