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Mary’s Articles
A Brief Resurrection
I was sitting next to my husband in our neighborhood pub on a spring afternoon, munching on fish and chips…
Faitheist, Courage, and Keeping Up with the Johnsons’ Eleven Faith Traditions
Chris Stedman, who is the assistant humanist chaplain at Harvard University, intrigued me when we would meet at Harvard Humanist events…
Pope Benedict an unexpected revolutionary
During the 1980s, when I was a nun in Rome, a priest who served as private secretary to three popes came to the convent to tell us stories…
Nuns in Street Clothing Shouldn’t Frighten Vatican
The Vatican recently finished an exhaustive, three-year inquest, the kind it reserves for its gravest problems…
In Search of Sisterhood: How Mary Johnson Found and Lost Her Faith
The cardboard box on the rack above my bus seat held what was left of my possessions. In a few hours they would belong to God, and so would I…
Remembering Princess Diana
and Mother Teresa: They Met at My House
This week marks the fifteenth anniversaries of the tragic deaths, just six days apart, of two twentieth century icons, beloved women who first met at my house…
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“Engage With Life”: A Q & A with Author Mary Johnson
Mary Johnson believed she was born to be a nun. But reality led her to a different path…
Poets + Writers: Mary Johnson’s An Unquenchable Thirst
When we meet Mary Johnson on the first page of her debut memoir, An Unquenchable Thirst: Following Mother Teresa in Search of Love, Service, and an Authentic Life, published this month by Spiegel & Grau, she is on her way to meet with a literary agent about turning the previous two decades of her life into a book…
The Calling of Disorder
“Mother could believe this about anyone, but she cannot believe it about you.” These were some of the last words the late Mother Teresa spoke to Mary Johnson 24 years ago; saints have a habit of speaking in the third-person…
Out of the order
It is a sentence you’d expect to read in a pulp bodice-ripper, not an ex-nun’s memoir, but here it is: “As the hand cupped my soft flesh, resistance melted, and we seemed to float above every snoring sister in the dormitory.”…
An Interview with Mary Johnson, Author of An Unquenchable Thirst
I reached out to her to ask if she’d be interested in an interview. To my delight, she was! Please welcome Mary Johnson to Daylight Atheism as she discusses her book and her extraordinary life story…
Following Mother Teresa in An Unquenchable Thirst
“I want earth, not heaven,” concludes Mary Johnson in the epilogue to her spellbinding memoir, An Unquenchable Thirst. In the book, she describes her spiritual calling to work with Mother Teresa, along with the inner reckonings that compelled her to leave a nun’s life and her faith after 20 years in the convent…
An Interview with Mary Johnson, a Nun Who Worked Under Mother Teresa and Later Became an Atheist
Twenty years ago, Mary Johnson was a nun. In fact, until 1997, Johnson was serving as a nun under Mother Teresa in the Missionaries of Charity…
Ex-nun writes of life under Mother Teresa
When she was 17 years old, Mary Johnson saw a photograph of Mother Teresa in a magazine and knew she had found her future. Within two years, she had become a nun with the Missionaries of Charity, the order that Mother Teresa founded…
An Unquenchable Thirst
Sharing a birthday with Mother Teresa, an international female icon, made me more aware of her than most of my non-Catholic friends. Mother Teresa is regarded as one of the greatest women on the planet by a lot of people who generally wouldn’t revere a religious leader. I’m not one of them…
Mary with Erin Burnett on CNN’s “OutFront”
Rosie O’Donnell Interviews Mary Johnson
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