For over a decade, Jamie Manson has been a thought leader and advocate in the field of women’s equality and reproductive rights in the Catholic Church and the public square. For 12 years, she was a columnist at the National Catholic Reporter where she was one of the few openly LGBTQ journalists in the Catholic media in the world. She was an often-solitary voice for reproductive freedom and justice and was one of the first to sound the alarm about the right-wing push for religious freedom. Her columns led to interviews with the CBS News, MSNBC and NPR, and her commentary has been quoted in the New York Times. She has been published in the Washington Post, the L.A. Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Daily Beast, Buzzfeed and Rewire News.

Jamie’s expertise in Catholicism and sexual ethics was first formed during her Master of Divinity studies at Yale with her mentor, Margaret Farley. In 2002, she aided Farley in co-funding the All Africa Conference: Sister to Sister, which supports religious women who minister to those suffering from the HIV/AIDS pandemic. She edited and wrote the introduction to Changing the Questions: Explorations in Christian Ethics, a collection of writings by Margaret Farley (Orbis Books, 2015).

An internationally recognized, authoritative voice on gender equality, sexuality and reproductive health, Jamie has spent over a decade challenging the hierarchy’s teachings on women’s ordination, contraceptive access, abortion, religious liberty and LGBTQ issues. She has won over a dozen awards from the Catholic Press Association and is a three-time winner of the Religious News Writers Association’s (RNA) award for the Commentary of the Year. She also won the Wilbur Award for Best Online Religion News Story for her Buzzfeed story “Feminism in Faith.” In 2015, her activism on behalf of women earned her the Theresa Kane Award for Women of Vision and Courage.