A look at Ms. Landry’s life in theology, activist roots, views on social justice and feminism, and what she hopes every Marymount girl will take with her into the world.

Sloane Leipzig (SL): How did you venture into theology initially? 

Ms. Landry (JL): They used to call theology the queen of the sciences and I love that, and to me, that’s what it is. Theology makes you think with all these different hats on. And I also like it because not many women study it and now more women are. And I started studying theology at the cusp of the whole movement…there is always a professional organization [with these movements] and for me that was the American Academy of Religion. You would go to a conference and it would be only men: men teaching biblical studies and theology and ethics and all that and then once in a while you would start seeing the women. It was kind of like the feminist movement hit at the same time, and it brought so much energy. We had to push; there was an excitement about it, we were going to study theology even though we were forbidden to. I think from an early age I liked the study of religion and I always felt that I had a conversation in my head with God. When I was a kid they were little girl questions like, “Where does my cat go when it dies?” but those are actually very big theological questions. Those are the questions that always interested me. I went to a Catholic grade school but a public high school, where I started taking a literature class and we read books by Steinbeck and Dickens. Those are always stories about justice and the poor and I remember feeling in me that I wanted to do something about those issues. It unleashed something in me reading The Pearl and Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and that got me interested to then study it. You could do something called Peace Studies back then where you would go to a liberal arts school, but then study conflict resolution in the world, activism basically, and that’s what got me started. Then I found that you needed a better foundation. Many of the activists were based in religion and they used scripture as their basis for righting, for correcting issues in the world, and I realized that’s what I wanted. Don’t forget that I’m Catholic and back then you didn’t go to theology school unless you were going to be a nun or a priest, so I had to be something else, I had to create a new field for myself. The divinity school accepted me, and I was going to go for my doctorate, but first I had to get my Masters of Divinity, and I had to do internships to get that. So I did internships at universities like Georgetown and I found this great area where you didn’t have to go on and get your doctorate, you could get hired as a university chaplain; so I took all that education and activism and working with young people.

SL: Your upbringing is incredibly interesting and I was wondering if you could elaborate on that and how it encouraged you into your field.

JL: I loved growing up in the 60s because all the big things were happening: the war and peace movement, the women’s movement. My parents had a huge influence. It was not a normal upbringing; I mean who grows up in a commune? It was an intellectual group. My dad and mom, who were living in Montreal went to a conference and met Dorothy Day. At that time, the whole Catholic Worker movement was very strong. She had a huge influence on my dad, and together they started this commune, St. Francis Acres. My dad had been a Franciscan monk before he got married and he really believed in their ideology, and I would call it an intentional community. It was really to discuss the issues of the day. They had a printing press and they would print the thinking of the movement. It had a huge influence on me. My mom was completely different. She loved the arts. She would take my sister and me to this art center outside the commune where she was involved with painting and theater and dance, and we would just watch this mom who constantly brought light to our world.

SL: What do you feel has been the most formative theological experience or concept for you thus far in your career?

JL: God as the ultimate mystery. I know that’s a big concept. Earlier on it was feminism: when I started studying theology I realized how male it was and that this was never the intention of Jesus. Looking at the primary sources I understood that in fact Jesus was a feminist in so many ways. He called women and he challenged some of the very patriarchal things of the day: everything from when the woman was being stoned to death for adultery (which was the law) to when a woman was complimenting Jesus saying, “blessed is she who bore you” and he said, “no rather blessed is she who hears the word of God and keeps it.” So the woman was appealing to biology, the fact that women give birth, but He was appealing to the intellectual and moral life of a woman. I loved studying this and finding all of the feminine imagery for God in the Hebrew bible and the Old Testament. I had never been taught that, but it is there. All this started expanding my view of God and the Christian endeavor that we are called to, and this was enticing to me. I would say that was huge, and had it not been for feminism colliding with theology, it never would have been uncovered.

SL: This year Marymount’s mission is to “To awaken a consciousness of social justice.”  How do you feel social justice intersects with theology in our world today?

JL: Huge. If we have a religion or a spirituality that is devoid of the call to right systems that are oppressive, then it is a false spirituality. If we have a social justice commitment that also does not have a sense that all social justice efforts are way bigger, grounded in something way bigger than ourselves, then it is just works of righteousness, and as Catholics we don’t believe in that. To me a healthy spirituality must have both: the great sense of the ultimate and holy mystery of the world and really grounded in that we know the face of God the most when we are trying to alleviate needless suffering, whether it be for the poor, or for women, or for the earth as in Pope Francis’s encyclical.

SL: Similarly, this year our school has really taken a deeper focus on feminism, especially in our theology classes. How do you feel that feminism is intersecting with theology right now?

JL: I think it’s still very Catholic; I get a lot of excitement of how Pope Francis has been, especially with the washing of women’s feet on Holy Thursday. This is what I think about feminism: women are the best friends of the Church, of religion, of theology; but religion has not always been the best friend to women. We are called equally to discipleship. I do think that feminism does bring a very different set of principles and challenges to traditional theology, and I think that is healthy because if our theology cannot handle challenges and questioning and thinking intellectually and rigorously, then it’s just fluff. Catholic theology is very deep, it has intellectual rigor, and it can handle these very cerebral questions.

SL: What are the most important aspects of the social justice that you wish to impart to our students both through our experience at Marymount and the curriculum?

JL: I really want the girls to have a sense of the RSHM; the order of our school is an amazing group of women.  They have teased out in their community what all of these issues look like for women, because they started as an order of women helping women and girls. I want every girl that graduates from Marymount to bring with her some area that she wants to affect in the world; in whatever way she can, where women and children are being robbed of their human dignity. It can be anything from working with the homeless to teaching literacy. To take the core values of our school and our sisters and make them known. We talk about these values each year, and we just want our girls to take them and carry them through life. It’s not different from Catholic theology, but it has a very unique and particular expression because of these sisters.