LCWR 2017 - As hundreds of sisters in leadership gather Aug. 8-11 in Orlando, Florida, planners are looking for the meeting to be a spiritual experience, not a business meeting. As in 2016, the conference format involves contemplative dialogue; current issues to discuss include being a countercultural presence in the world, restructuring the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, addressing loss, and shaping the evolution of religious life.

"God's faithfulness to us is the ocean, the sky, and the sand, all of them infinite, rooting us, rushing toward us, warming us; it is bigger and deeper than our human hearts could ever grasp."

The Wheaton Franciscans, a community of about 45 vowed members, are finishing a transfer of their affordable housing properties to Mercy Housing, after discerning a need to ensure the long-term future of their ministry. They had worked with the Religious Sisters of Mercy earlier to transfer their hospitals in Iowa to Mercy Health Network.

See for Yourself - There's that passage from John 15: 2 that explains a lot about the human condition and the reality of suffering around us: "He removes every branch in me that bears no fruit. Every branch that bears fruit he prunes to make it bear more fruit."

Nine years ago, a song in Spanish about asking the Lord to call us to service helped to give language to the love song that my heart had somehow already begun singing — but that still terrified me. Now, as a vowed Sister of Charity of Cincinnati, I am in awe about God's faithfulness.

"We live in a world filled with the action of God’s creating love and are partners of that divine activity in a time when major social and global change creates both enormous challenge and significant opportunity."

When no priests were available, the bishop of the Quebec Diocese of Rouyn-Noranda sought and received Vatican permission for a local nun to officiate at a recent wedding. Bishop Dorylas Moreau said the wedding was carried out according to a long-established provision of canon law.

Get beyond stories of slavery and crime: Watching the black women scientists of NASA in "Hidden Figures" and the achievements and disappointments of the family in "Fences" can open minds to some of the dilemmas facing North America today, politically, socially and racially.

Hospital Sisters of St. Francis Sr. Jomary Trstensky started her career in Catholic health care more than 50 years ago as a nurse. In June, she was a recipient of a Catholic Health Association Lifetime Achievement Award for inspiring her colleagues to live the values and mission of the Hospital Sisters and Catholic Church. She is an expert in leadership.

LCWR 2017 - A learner, a visionary, a strategic thinker, a source of energy — those close to St. Joseph Sr. Mary Pellegrino have no shortage of buoyant words to say about the outgoing president of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, an organization facing the challenge of "reconfiguring ourselves to the future." Pellegrino will become LCWR's past president Aug. 11.