Letters to Women - Exploring the Feminine Genius

“I like to read, but I have no idea what books to read.” “I sometimes pick up a self-help book or a spiritual book, but right now, reading other books with my schedule just feels selfish.” “I haven’t liked reading since I was a little kid” “I know there are good books out there, but I don’t know where to start, so I just pick up a bestseller that looks good when I’m browsing at Target.” Are you no...

What does it mean to run a business as a Catholic woman? What does success look like? What does integration look like? How do you discover your gifts and talents and steward those well? In today’s episode, I sit down with Elise Crawford Gallagher. She’s the owner and CEO of Ringlet, a company that equips women to blaze their own path to business success and financial freedom through their marketin...

Does it ever seem like life just kind of happens to you? You log onto Instagram or look around at the women in your small group or in the pew beside you at church and it just seems like everyone else figured it out. Meanwhile, you’re in the dark, wondering how people do it all, how some people have this adulting thing down. What’s their secret? Did you miss the day in school where they taught you...

Do you remember how simple it was to make and keep girlfriends when you were really young? All you had to do was wear the same pair of tennis shoes as a classmate or gal on the playground and man, you were set. Best friends forever. But the further we grow away from kindergarten classrooms and recess camaraderie, the more complicated friendship with other women seems to become. Let’s face it - fri...

I dress rehearse disaster on the regular. If I’m driving in the car with my girls and we’re having fun bopping along to Ellie Holcomb, it’s so easy for me to spiral into thinking “what if we get in a car wreck” because everyone knows that the scene in the movie right before the car wreck is that closeup shot of a family getting along great in the car together. You know tragedy is going to strike....

Just a heads-up - today’s episode is a conversation about intimacy within marriage. There’s a lot of advice floating around out there for us as Catholic women today when it comes to our marriages and our motherhood. And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but a lot of that advice tends to be pretty conflicting. It seems like every time I log onto Instagram, there’s a conversation about who-said-what a...

There are three Lenten practices that Christ and the Church invite us to really lean into - prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. I don’t know about you, but I usually fall into two traps when it comes to fasting. Either I decide that this Lent is going to be the most challenging Lent for me ever - like the Lent where Joseph had to talk me out of fasting on just bread and water for the full forty days....

This week, we’re celebrating the feast day of St. Joseph - and Pope Francis’ invitation to all of us in 2021 to “go to Joseph” is still ringing in our ears. But what can we learn from St. Joseph as Catholic women - isn’t he more of a saint for the guys? Today I’m sitting down with Elizabeth Lev. She’s an art historian and tour guide who lives in Rome and she’s recently written a beautiful book on...

Ready or not, here comes Lent. Some of us are READY for it. Some of us hate it. But most of us know that we’re supposed to be transformed by Lent. So we give up our alarm clocks, we take on extra prayer time, we put away our coffee maker for forty days (well, some of you do, I haven’t done that one yet since my sacrifice isn’t supposed to be everyone around me’s sacrifice).  But what if Lent...

When you start planning a wedding, it’s crazy how the tiny to-dos you never knew were even a thing start to take over your life. The nitty-gritty of guest lists, venues, and the schedule of the big day itself stack up and pretty quickly, those tiny to-dos seem like an insurmountable mountain. It’s been five years since Joseph and I entered into the vocation of marriage, but I bet that if you’re tu...

You’ve probably heard the statistic - nearly half of Americans (48%) who are married or living with their partner say that they argue with that person about MONEY. Most of those money fights are about spending habits, with one person saying that the other spends too much and the other person saying the other is too cheap. Then comes fights about being dishonest with money, how to pay the bills, fo...

Have you ever wondered why we are so divided as women today? Then there’s feminism, but it doesn’t seem to be uniting us by addressing core problems we all face as women. In fact, in my experience, even conversations around the topic of what feminism is and isn’t can be divisive. Maybe you feel that being a woman today comes with unrealistic expectations and a side of shame for not doing it all, n...

You wouldn’t think that something as simple as showering would be that big of a hurdle to jump for me. But until recently, I was letting showering just kind of happen to me. If the girls’ naptime coordinated on an afternoon I didn’t have anything planned, then maybe I’d get a shower in. But after many afternoons passing and the stars and nap times not aligning, I got sick of washing my curly hair...

It was 2017. I’d heard about this thing called the Saint Andrew’s Christmas novena, which honestly is a bit of a misnomer given that you pray it for twenty-five days, saying the small and beautiful prayer fifteen times a day. I’d heard it was a great prayer to pray with big intentions, and I had one. So I set the prayer as the lock screen on my phone and prayed every day, fifteen times a day. The...

The holidays are packed with conversations and emotions around the topic of food and our bodies. We critique ourselves in the mirror as we’re getting ready for that work party, we make New Year’s Resolutions to work out three times a week at least, compare our bodies to the women we see at Christmas Mass, and we may even hear comments, intentional or unintentional from family members about how we...

If a friend asks if she can swing by on short notice, do you spend the short window of time that you have before she arrives cramming papers in the kitchen cabinets, panic vacuuming, yelling at your kids to clean up their piles of stuff? Then, when your friend walks in the door, do you apologize for your home? What if I told you that people don’t come to your home to critique the laundry pile, the...

Have you made a commitment to exercise only to fall off the bandwagon a few weeks in? Have you ever gotten angry at your body for failing you but also the (possibly) unrealistic goals you set for yourself? What about using exercise as a way to punish yourself or a way to cancel out what you think is a poor choice, instead of moving your body in a way that supports your WHOLE health as a woman? In...

Have you ever wanted to logout of Instagram for a day, maybe the weekend, but held off because you were afraid you were going to miss out on something? Are there clothes hanging in your closet or beauty products in your bathroom, or decor in your house that you bought (maybe influenced by an Instagram ad or someone sharing about it on Facebook) that you thought was going to solve all your problems...

I think we can all agree that it’s no fun to go through suffering. And not only is it hard to go through a season of suffering, it’s also hard to admit you need help - at least it is for me. It’s a humbling experience to admit I need help carrying a cross.   In today’s episode, I’m sitting down with Therese Williams. Stricken with spinal meningitis at eighteen months old, Therese has lived as...

When you hear the phrase “acts of mercy” or “works of service,” do you squirm and wonder if I’m going to ask you to add another thing to your already too-long to-do list? Do you worry that since you don’t have the time in this season of life to volunteer somewhere that you’re failing when it comes to living mercy in your daily life and you should just be doing more - maybe this fear that you aren’...

Often, when we talk about adoption, it’s easy to focus on the couple who have discerned that the Lord is calling them to adopt. And, that is a beautiful part of the story - one I’ve featured on past Letters to Women episodes, in fact. But I think that the other side of the story, the experience of a woman making an adoption plan for her unborn child, is something we don’t focus on enough. What doe...

This year, after FIVE YEARS, I finally went swimsuit shopping. And let me tell you, it was a months long process. I added and removed at least thirty different suits from my online shopping carts and FINALLY landed on one - but even then, there are still things that I would change about it. The whole process reminded me why it took me five years to update my swimwear. It’s not that fun of a proces...

Have you ever picked up a book on the lives of the saints and thought . . . well, shoot. I don’t know how I’m going to do this holiness thing. I’m not like Saint Jerome, or, maybe you think you’re a little too much like Saint Jerome with his grumpy, curmudgeon ways. But what if I told you that there are literally hundreds of saints I want to introduce you - saints who share some of your struggles,...

If you were to sit down with your younger self, what would you tell her? In today’s episode, I’m sitting down with Emily Stimpson Chapman and we’re talking about her new book, “Letters to Myself from the End of the World” It’s a book that Emily wrote to her younger self, equipping her for the challenges she’d face in a world where the Church is plagued by scandal, the culture is on the verge of co...

In today’s episode, I’m sitting down with Amanda Weeder and we’re talking about Amanda’s passion for helping tell the story of a home, her tried and true decorating tips (ones that I’d never heard before our conversation together), and why you don’t have to feel guilty as a Catholic woman if you’re wanting a beautiful home to retreat to. I loved this conversation with Amanda and I can’t wait to sh...