How does a girl growing up as a gymnast and cheerleader in northern California end up as a Benedictine nun who splits her time between a convent in Dinklage, Germany, and another in Connemara, Ireland? 

On this day when we celebrate mothers, I found myself thinking about my relationship with my mother, and how my experience with her, during her final months, profoundly affected my religious beliefs.

Pleiku City, Vietnam - The homes run by Filles de la Médaille Miraculeuse nuns provide children health care and education, along with opportunities to learn from each other's ethnic traditions. Once grown, the orphans take those skills into their communities.

"Refounding is not easy: it was never meant to be. And yet it is a possibility for all of us, no matter how stuck we may feel. But it does require a risky, daring sense of openness and a willingness to embrace daunting new horizons of creativity and experiment."

Series review: "The Handmaid's Tale," a new series streaming on Hulu, is about personhood, identity, freedom and abuse of power in bleak dystopian tale set in a Christian theocracy of the not too distant future.

GSR Today - We at Global Sisters Report know that the work of Catholic women religious makes a huge difference to millions of people around the world. So we are very pleased that GSR has won recognition from the Associated Church Press.

Notes from the Field - I have never lived alone and, as a woman obsessed with intentional communities, I never planned to. But now is the time to learn who I am with just myself.

Book Review: The roots of a new understanding of religious life lie in an understanding of the paradigm religious have historically followed and the often misunderstood and misrepresented history of religious life. 

"We are made in the image of a God whose life is relationship, whose life is difference and likeness and presence and love."

GSR Today - I was always a little sad about the separation of the sheep from the goats at the Last Judgment. Sheep, welcome to heaven. Goats, off to the bad place.