Patricia McGuire

Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I am a Girl Scout.

Recently, I shook hands with more than 200 Girl Scouts assembled at Trinity for the annual "In Your Honor" ceremony celebrating the Gold Award and Silver Trefoil Award Girl Scouts of the Nation's Capital...

Like millions of Americans, over the course of a few weekends earlier this year, I spent some quality time with my good friend TurboTax and a box of receipts as I went through the annual ritual of rendering to Caesar. I do believe that paying taxes is the price we...

Marion Barry has done it again --- he's helped everyone to miss his point by cloaking a nugget of truth in the hard, ugly shell of racially-tinged rhetoric. Mr. Barry made a comment about Filipino nurses that implied that these excellent professionals are taking jobs from...

Good heavens, what have the nuns done now? No less than the Congregatio Pro Doctrina Fidei (the Vatican Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, or CDF) has issued a scathing "assessment" of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious (LCWR), the association of 57,000 Catholic sisters...

Sometimes, it seems like my cell phone is buzzing all night.

Tue Mar 20 9:23 pm: Shooting in the 300 block of W St, NE

Tue Mar 20 7:20 pm: Robbery force and violence in the 1900 block of I St NE

Tue Mar 20 5:57 pm: Robbery...

Leave it to Geraldo to give us the most disturbingly absurd commentary on the tragedy of this moment: "His hoodie killed Trayvon Martin as surely as George Zimmerman did," is the TV oracle's finding of mens rea (legalese for guilty intent) in this sad case.

I was part of a diverse group of about 20 women business leaders who participated in a roundtable discussion of women's economic empowerment with the United States Senate Democratic Steering and Oversight Committee on March 21. Following is an excerpt from my statement:

Education is the essential foundation...

I love teaching. I really believe teaching is a vocation and I have been called to be a teacher... I believe when you are a teacher it is a lifestyle, you may leave school at night, but your thoughts are always with your students and how to reach them and...

Did he do it for the money? Not wanting to slide into the gutter where Rush Limbaugh crouches quite comfortably, I will not accuse him of prostitution in apologizing to Sandra Fluke in order to, allegedly, keep his advertisers. But the pungent odor coming up from...

With Osama Bin Laden and Muammar Gaddafi out of the way, we thought we could at least enjoy spring training without fear. But thanks to the ever-vigilant wingnut industry, we have a whole new face of evil to keep us awake at night.

That cute brownie selling you Tagalongs at...

Ash Wednesday marks the beginning of Lent, the solemn 40-day period during which Christians prepare for the celebration of the Resurrection at Easter. Lent is a time of reflection during which the faithful practice various acts of abstinence, "giving up" favorite things as small acts of penance and symbols of...

Mary Catherine O'Shaunnessy (not her real name) was missing. A hole appeared in the class photo where her smiling visage once graced the back row. Sister Perpetua had a very effective way of teaching us Catholic high school girls about the importance of abstinence. Any girl who had the lack...

College is not for everyone. But everyone should be a lifelong learner.

D.C. Council Chairman Kwame Brown is right to want every pupil in the D.C. Public Schools to aspire to the highest possible levels of learning. However, the specifics of his new bill -- "The...

Disenfranchised. Completely.

The good citizens of D.C.'s Ward 5 might have a hard time shaking off that feeling upon hearing the news that members of the D.C. Council think that their colleague Harry Thomas, Jr., should take a voluntary (paid) leave of absence from representing their interests...

What's the difference between a fire hose and a can of pepper spray? About 50 years. YouTube. Two generations of complacency about civil and human rights. And a radical decline in that essential element of a true university, freedom --- freedom of assembly, of...

High priests and little boys. Haven't we seen this movie before? The script is appallingly familiar, laden with the grotesque phrases of grand jury findings about men in positions of trust committing unspeakable acts upon children.

This time, the alleged perpetrator was a preacher of our national religion...

Sister Rosetta* is to blame for my inability to do fractions in my head. Oh, she tried to teach me at St. Margaret's School, but my attention span for third grade arithmetic was limited. I was far more interested in being sure that the most popular girl in class, Sally...

Now that Martin Luther King, Jr. is safely encased in a granite monument and people are congratulating themselves on living in a "post-racial" world with an African-American president of the United States and another African American candidate for the presidency on the right, can we lay to rest...

Thucydides, the Greek historian, had a thing or two to say to #OccupyWallStreet and its progeny like #OccupyDC: "Justice will not come until those who are not hurt are just as outraged as those who are," he wrote in the 4th Century B.C. People who, until rather recently,...

Protesters are occupying Wall Street and streets all around the country as public rage grows over the shameful corporate greed that undermined the economy and put millions of people out of work and homes.

Poverty levels are rising to numbers not seen for half a century.