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Miriam Therese (M.T.) Winter discovered the magic of words and music as a child. She wrote her first poem when she was just six and a year later began to learn the piano. Her love of music followed her when, many years later, Winter joined the Medical Mission Sisters in Philadelphia, ready to begin her dream of traveling to developing nations and providing much needed medical care. During her travels, she developed a new dream, that of spreading care and love through song rather than medicine, and she continues to transform the world.

Gloria Winter was born in Passaic, N.J., in 1938. After her high school graduation in 1955, Winter entered the Medical Mission religious community. When taking her vows, she received not only her habit, rosary, cross and veil, but also her new name: Miriam Therese. Winter went on to earn her B.A. in music from Catholic University, her Master’s degree in religious education from McMaster Divinity College, and a Ph.D. in liturgical studies from Princeton Theological Seminary. She studied Gregorian chants and soon began writing her own songs, songs that people in her own time could understand and relate to. Before long, Winter’s songs found their way into churches and hearts around the country.

Over the course of her journey, Winter discovered feminist spirituality and committed herself to the full liberation of women, believing that this liberation is essential to the freedom of all people. Armed with her musical compositions and her steadfast convictions, she traveled to developing nations—not to provide the medical assistance she once envisioned, but to offer hope through music and to empower women through her ministries. As a Medical Mission Sister, she has ministered to refugees in camps along the Thai-Cambodian border and to starving children in Ethiopia, and has shared her scholarship and music with communities in Botswana, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, and India. Through workshops, lectures, prayer, and song, she addresses issues of justice and gender, peace and reconciliation, global inequality, and personal spirituality. She has also performed her original music in concerts across the United States, as well as in Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Since 1998, she has ministered to women inmates at the York Correctional Institution in Niantic, Connecticut. She served as a professor of liturgy, worship, spirituality, and feminist studies at Hartford Seminary, where she founded the Women’s Leadership Institute, and has now retired to the Medical Mission Sisters’ community home in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

MT Winter has received honorary doctorates from Albertus Magnus College and St. Joseph’s College. She has been included on ASCAP's 1968 Popular Awards List and has received awards for several of her books including WomanWisdom and WomanWitness. In 2001, she published Out of the Depths: The Story of Ludmilla Javorova, Ordained Roman Catholic Priest, which explores the calling of women to the priesthood, and in 2009 she published Paradoxology: Spirituality in a Quantum Universe.

During These Times:

 1946-1965: Women's Activism in Conservative Times 

1966-Present Day: Struggle for Justice 

Related Links:

Paradoxology Excerpt

“Thy Will Be Done” (song)

Page at Hartford Seminary