Books by Sinsinawa Dominicans
Reviews of selected titles authored by Dominican Sisters of Sinsinawa.
There are also two classic books to download in PDF format:
Golden Bells in Convent Towers: The Story of Father Samuel and Saint Clara
and
Paul and Third World Women Theologians (1999), and, Feminism and Beyond (2004) by Sister Loretta Dornisch
If you guessed “Paul and Third World Women Theologians” might be about what third world women theologians say about Saint Paul, or anything like that, you’re way off. Sister Loretta seems to strongly dislike Saint Paul, so her book is a reading of Saint Paul’s epistles as if Paul were a woman–“Paula.” His friends become Timothea, Sylvana, etc. And instead of a funny and flip approach to this aggressively foolish book that I cannot describe to others without laughing, I approach it in excruciating detail and intellectual seriousness in order to be specific about the problems with a book that may even be used, incredibly inappropriately, for college courses. Then I review Sister Loretta’s book “Feminism and Beyond” in which she is very negative about marriage apparently due to seeing relationships with men as more or less inherently exploitative, but approvingly predicts that “In Western society we can project an increase in single females as well as lesbianism.” Maybe you could call these works Marxist-feminist-lesbian critique of Christianity.
read moreAwakening to Prayer; A Woman’s Perspective, by Sister Clare Wagner (2009)
This book by a Sinsinawa Dominican who is a Madison Call to Action member and “new cosmology” enthusiast, is published by the mainstream Catholic publisher Saint Anthony Messenger Press. It’s part of a series titled “Called to Holiness: Spirituality for Catholic Women.” This book is generally sweet-natured. But behind the “emerging spirituality” it portrays, is an “emerging theology” that doesn’t seem to have any clear relationship to the Catholic Church. Sister Clare is a devotee of “the new cosmology” or “the universe story” and makes various statements suggestive of panentheism, and the divinity of Jesus is left ambiguous. There is not a great deal of reference to God Himself in personal terms, which seems part of the fallout from feminist refusal to speak of God as “He” or “Father”; God is “Unfathomable Mystery” or “loving Divine Presence.” At the end of each chapter there is the sort of made-up private ritual popular with the “womenchurch” movement, for which, for instance, besides lighting a candle, “it would be helpful to place before you: an alarm clock, a bright cloth (a “wake up” color) and three to five rocks or stones.”
read moreWhat a Modern Catholic Believes About Women, by Sister Albertus Magnus McGrath (1972)
Written by a history professor Sister engaged heavily with the National Organization for Women in promoting the Equal Rights Amendment, this polemical work introduces us to all kinds of insulting or demeaning things some Catholics have historically said or thought about women, portraying these as “the Catholic position” and the Church as the “land of the perpetual put-down,” wherein “woman is not made in the image of God.” She compares the situation of women in the Church to the situation of black Americans which was being remedied by the black Liberation Movement, and insists there needs to be an elimination of anything upholding the order of man over woman. “The Church is not meant to be the Church of the hierarchy, the Church of men. It is the Church of Christ who loved and befriended and was served intimately by women.” Sister Albertus Magnus McGrath proposes “women’s ordination” as important to justice.
read moreThe Feminization of the Church, by Sister Kaye Ashe (1997)
Sister Kaye Ashe, Prioress General of the Sinsinawa Dominicans from 1986-1994, issues a strident call in her 1997 book The Feminization of the Church? for “affirmative action” to “feminize” the Catholic Church by changing meanings and practices. This was published by the National Catholic Reporter, an organization that is afoul of canon law in numerous ways, according to their local bishop. This book is an inside look at how radical feminist heretics think. It proposes socialism and Marxism as corrective to traditional...
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