Hail Ruth, Full Of Grace.

Hail Ruth, full of grace.

Our hope is with thee.

Blessed art thou among women,

and blessed is the fruit of thy brilliance,

feminist jurisprudence.

Holy Ruth, Mother of liberal dissent,

pray for us revolutionaries,

now and at the hour of our defiance.

Amen.

This prayer is based on the Catholic prayer "Hail Mary." While I am not Catholic or even particularly religious in the conventional sense, I’ve always felt drawn to Mary as the most well-known embodiment of the feminine sacred in the Western World. To me, the myth of the Virgin Birth is a story about the power of women and femininity. In writing this modern take on the prayer, I intended not to disparage Catholicism or the original prayer but to borrow the template to honor what I hold sacred in my life -- the struggle to make a better world, through the lens of the career of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the legal feminist movement she helped to promulgate.

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Annie is a lawyer and dog mom of three. She started playing rugby in 2014 in the hopes of fulfilling her lifelong dream of getting a cool nickname. She promptly fell in love with one of her teammates and got a wife instead. Her teammates still call her Annie.