Over her 36 years of prison ministry, the St. Joseph sister's work has chipped away at U.S. support for the death penalty, fellow activists say: "They don't get argued into thinking differently, they get storied into thinking differently." Sr. Helen Prejean said she never set out to be an activist, especially one advocating on behalf of death row inmates. She spent her early years as a sister working in the suburbs as a middle school teacher, director of religious education at a New Orleans parish and a director of her order's novices.

In this public morass, is there a contribution to be made by Dominican sisters who claim that their grounding principle is veritas (truth)? We might take a lesson from our Dominican brother Thomas Aquinas and his ideas on the discipline of study.

Notes from the Field - Welcoming the stranger, building connections, celebrating differences and discovering commonalities — these are the gifts which, having been blessed with in Chile, I hope to offer all whom I encounter in the future.

"Prophets are called to be faithful, not successful, and so are those who preach truth today."

Three friends walked 335 miles in 25 days to experience the spirit of the journey of St. Rose Philippine Duchesne, who arrived in America in 1818 to establish schools with the Society of the Sacred Heart.

GSR Today: On my visits over the years to Myanmar, I have seen the Sisters of Our Lady of the Missions grow past political challenges and become more involved in development projects for women: Farming, training of young women in computer skills, tailoring and other income generation skills.

Families in Riimenze, South Sudan, were displaced in late 2016 and early 2017 as fighting between government soldiers and rebels escalated.

Sr. Lucy Thorson joined Sisters of Our Lady of Sion when she was 19 after she finished high school. She saw the congregation as an opportunity to get out into the world, and its base in Jewish history and Jewish-Christian relations became the path she followed through her career and life.

Preaching truth is needed now as much as it was in the time of the ancient biblical prophets who had to deal with many of the same political, social, economic and religious challenges that people face today in a 21st-century world.