Patheos February Featured Writer Mary Pezzulo

Patheos February Featured Writer Mary Pezzulo February 1, 2025

Marry PezzuloMary Pezzulo received her BA in English at Otterbein University in Westerville, Ohio. She came to Steubenville to earn a Master’s degree in philosophy and Catholic bioethics from Franciscan University and had finished most of her coursework before she suffered a chronic illness that derailed her university career. Since then, she’s been learning from the school of hard knocks.

Her essays on politics, faith, religious trauma, and life in Northern Appalachia, have been published in the Catholic Herald, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Convivium Journal, and the Feinschwarz theology blog. She has delivered lectures on the Uncanny in the field of aesthetics at the Power of Beauty Conference at Franciscan University, and the Terra Incognita Literary Gathering.

Mary says this about contributing to Patheos, “I enjoy writing at Patheos because we are allowed to say what we really think and ask hard questions about faith and get into spats, instead of presenting a little catechism of expected answers. Faith is not a rulebook, faith is lived, so we can’t approach faith without exploring all of life, and I couldn’t do that if I didn’t have such a long leash to write about whatever else was on my mind.”

She offers these words of advice, “My advice is to never be afraid to put your own self with all your vulnerabilities in your writing. The personal is political but it’s also spiritual. You will never meet a religion that isn’t embodied in people. You convey your religious practice through your own self. You can’t just be “Catholic.” You have to be Mary the traumatized Irish American Catholic here in Appalachia, or Suzie the happy liberal Catholic in California, or Manuel the Indigenous Mexican Catholic who also knows a lot about the local folk religions, or Vasyl the Byzantine Catholic from Ukraine. That’s how to be a person of faith, and that’s how to write as a person of faith. Always show your own self in your writing. That’s what people are excited to know.”


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