religiondispatches | What inspired you to write If Nuns Ruled the World?
Around 2009 I started spending a lot of time around nuns. I was
finishing a thesis for my masters over at NYU and the topic was how
Catholic nuns used social media. I started traveling around the country
to meet with nuns who blogged and tweeted.
Despite having gone to an all-girls Catholic high school I had just
as many stereotypes of Catholic sisters as anyone does. But the nuns I
met on the road began to shatter those stereotypes. They weren’t these
stuffy, ruler-wielding automatons. They were independent bad-asses. And
each of these bad-ass nuns led to another bad-ass nun. I would come back
home from some of these trips and share their stories at dinner parties
and people were just so surprised. They’d never heard of nuns doing so
many amazing things. In fact, they hadn’t heard that much about nuns at
all. That’s when I knew there were stories here that needed to be told.
What’s the most important take-home message for readers?
Nuns are the true embodiment of the way that Christians believe Jesus
Christ wanted us to live. They are right there fighting on the
frontlines of social justice for the people who live at the margins of
our society. They rarely get banner headlines or magazine covers or even
recognition from their male peers, but they do it anyway.
In my book I talk about Sister Jeannine Gramick’s fighting for the
rights of gay Catholics for the past four decades, Sister Joan Dawber
running a safe house for victims of human trafficking, Sister Donna
Quinn fighting for a woman’s right to have an abortion and Sister Simone
Campbell leading the Nuns on the Bus to lobby for political justice for
the poorest of the poor in America. These are women whose praises we
should be singing from the rooftops.
For a good portion of my career I covered the entertainment industry
and celebrities. One of my goals here was to elevate the incredible work
of the nuns so that we will consume their stories as hungrily as we
consume content about celebrities.
