Visiting Scholar Phyllis Zagano Considers Women’s Role in Catholic Church Ministry

Internationally acclaimed scholar and lecturer Phyllis Zagano, Ph.D., will deliver the Rev. William L. Rossner, S.J., Lecture in Theology for Rockhurst’s Visiting Scholar Lecture Series at 7:30 p.m., Thursday, March 13, in Mabee Theater.

Zagano’s lecture, “Women and Ministry in the Roman Catholic Church,” will address and contextualize contested questions relating to women’s ministerial roles. A senior research associate-in-residence at Hofstra University, Zagano is known to many for her National Catholic Reporter column.

Zagano is the author, or editor, of 16 theology and religious studies books, including Holy Saturday: An Argument for the Restoration of the Female Diaconate in the Catholic Church (Crossroad, 2000), which won a First Place Book Award from the Catholic Press Associated and the College Theology Society Annual Book award; and Women & Catholicism: Gender, Communion, and Authority(Macmillan, 2012), winner of a Second Place Book Award from the Catholic Press Association.

After receiving her bachelor’s degree at Marymount College, she earned master’s degrees in communication from Boston University, in literature from Long Island University and in theology from St. John’s University in New York before completing her doctorate at SUNY-Stony Brook.

Zagano has taught at St. Leo University, Yale University, Fordham University, Boston University and St. Thomas Aquinas College. She was a 2009 Fulbright Fellow at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland.

To register for this free, public lecture, call 816-501-4828. Mabee Theater is located in Sedgwick Hall on the Rockhurst University campus, 54th Street and Troost Avenue.