Mary Novak serves as the Executive Director of NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice. She is a lawyer, educator, chaplain, spiritual director, restorative justice practitioner, and activist who has worked in Catholic contexts for decades.
Before leading NETWORK, Mary served as a Mission Integrator and Adjunct Professor of Law at the Georgetown Law Center in Washington, D.C. In this role, she worked at the intersection of spirituality, psychology, and the work of justice
This episode explores how Mary’s family origins led her into an intersectional journey as a Catholic restorative justice practitioner. That journey informs her tenure at NETWORK, where she pursues a vision at the nexus of solidarity across faith, race, gender, and generation.
We discuss the threats of WCN within our unfinished experiment we call democracy and how her organization is leaning into it. And we wrap with reflections on how she – in the words of the mystic Howard Thurman – “centers down.”
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