Miriam Therese MacGillis
The founder of Genesis Farm, a learning center where people gather to search for more authentic ways to live in harmony with the natural world and each other, Sister Miriam became coordinator of Peace and Justice Education for the Newark Archdiocese in 1973. She joined the staff of Global Education Associates as program coordinator and art editor of “The Whole Earth Papers” in 1976 and she founded Genesis Farm, where she lives and works, in 1980. The farm, which practices biodynamic methods of agriculture, which are in tune with the natural rhythms of Earth, was one of the first to organize a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) venture. The farm now supports nearly 300 families.
Sister Miriam received her Masters degree in art from the University of Notre Dame and has taught art at the high school and college levels. Today she lectures extensively and has conducted workshops in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Asia and the Pacific. She also coordinates programs exploring the work of Thomas Berry, as he has interpreted the New Cosmology; and promotes Genesis Farm’s Earth Literacy program, which offers accreditation for graduate and undergraduate students.
Sister Miriam describes herself as having been formed by the three rivers that have shaped the regions of New Jersey where she has lived her life. She was born and lived her first 17 years in Bayonne, a small industrial city, separated from Manhattan by the Hudson River as it moves through its estuaries across the sweep of New York Harbor. When she was 7 years old, her family began to clear a home-site in a heavily wooded area along the Musconetcong River in what was then a rural and sparsely settled region of northwestern New Jersey. On weekends and throughout the summer, they worked together to build a small cabin, and Miriam’s childhood was deeply influenced by summers spent in the forests and fields of that watershed and the challenges of living for years with neither water nor electricity. Since 1980, she has lived along the Paulinskill River as it flows through the same watershed on its way to the upper Delaware River. Genesis Farm takes its place within a community of people and organizations working to preserve the wildlife, farms and rural communities of this highly threatened region.