by Nuri Vallbona
McAllen, Texas - More than 2,300 immigrant children have been separated from their parents after Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced a zero-tolerance policy for border crossers. Though family separation practices have been cancelled through executive order, suffering has not.
A plea agreement spared Rodney Earl Sanders from the death penalty, which was opposed by both sisters' congregations and their families. Sr. Paula Merrill of the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth and Sr. Margaret Held of the School Sisters of St. Francis were nurse practitioners ministering to the poor in rural Mississippi when they were stabbed to death in 2016.
A girls' boarding school in northern Uganda is providing real-life lessons in adjustments for both South Sudanese refugees and native Ugandan students.
Uganda has quietly absorbed a million South Sudanese refugees in the past few years. While challenges abound, the country's liberal policy toward refugees stems from its own recent tumultuous history.
• All the Seeking Refuge series stories can be found here.
by Nancy Corcoran
Contributor
The term queer has come to mean unconventional folks who demonstrate how maleness and femaleness are social constructions rather than divinely assigned categories. Believing that one cannot minister with humans we believe to be "other" than ourselves, I began reflecting on how sisters have also challenged the binary.
by GSR Staff
"Buds giving way to the small bursts of color pulsing through their veins, as the newness of blooming begins."
Nancy Corcoran is a Sister of Saint Joseph of Carondelet (St. Louis Province). A New Englander by birth, her first degree was in political science. After college, she served as a lay apostle in Hawaii before entering the convent at a time when many women were leaving. She has taught Grades 3-12 in rural and urban settings, established literacy clinics in Alabama and Mississippi, and after graduate work at Harvard Divinity School ministered as chaplain at Regina Dominican High School in Chicago and Wellesley College in Massachusetts.
Catholic News Service
Human Rights and Environment, a human rights organization co-founded by a Maryknoll sister has won the Letelier-Moffitt human rights award for its work with indigenous farmers high in the Andes Mountains of Peru.
World Refugee Day - Who is an official refugee? What makes a migrant? United Nations' definitions govern policy and practice for member countries, and these particular definitions haven't been updated in recent decades. With so many people moved away from their homes — 68.5 million — countries are working on setting up new binding provisions. Negotiation meetings on two new compacts continue next month, with the hope to have them finalized and signed by year's end.
It all started with a note pinned to the convent's bulletin board. "Urgent! Refugees arriving at SFO from Southeast Asia. Volunteers needed to assist at the International Terminal."
