Women at the Table - MAC Studies
Life/Work of MAC
Editorial Statement
Studies on the Life/Work of Margaret Anna Cusack, Margaret Anna Cusack, Mother M. Francis Clare, The Nun Of Kenmare, Founder Of St. Joseph's Sisters Of Peace (or MAC Studies, for short) is an online journal focused on research and writing about Margaret Anna Cusack, the Nun of Kenmare, known also by her religious name Sister or Mother Mary Francis Clare.
The purpose is twofold:
1. To provide a forum for publication of essays, book reviews, short articles, synopses of works-in-progress, and letters & comments, all having to do with the life and the work of this 19th-c. author, musician, advocate for the poor, woman religious, and founder of a Catholic religious congregation which she named the St. Joseph’s Sisters of Peace.
2. To encourage a rigorous study of Cusack’s literary oeuvre which opens a window onto her experiences as an Evangelical Anglican, as a High-Church Anglican and member of an Anglican Sisterhood, as a convert to Roman Catholicism and a member of a Roman Catholic religious order, as founder of a new Catholic religious congregation, and as one who in the last years of her life left the religious order she founded and the church of her adoption, to be finally laid to rest in an Anglican churchyard. Such study prepares the ground for comprehensive and accurate biography of this remarkable woman known to many simply as the Nun of Kenmare.
MAC STUDIES will be “published” annually, in June. The editors welcome contributions of full-length essays, short articles, book reviews, synopses of works-in-progress, and letters & comments concerning past and future research and writing which deal with the life/work of Margaret Anna Cusack. Standard scholarly style should be followed, with footnotes rather than endnotes. Contributions may be sent by attachment to the co-editors Rosalie McQuaide, CSJP and Janet Davis Richardson, CSJP.
The Lives of Catholic Saints are one long record of persecution during their mortal career, atoned for by canonization after their death, and a record of their persecutions and the causes for which they were persecuted would not be an unprofitable subject of study both for Catholics and Protestants.
-- Sister M. Francis Clare The Question of Today: Anti-Poverty and Progress, p. 13