From NCRonline, A small c catholic - As a Protestant with regular exposure to Catholicism, I'm always intrigued by reactions I hear from other Protestants (and people of non-Christian faith traditions) to Catholic women religious, a term many Protestants have never heard.

Spending time with the people of Chile in the wake of the destruction left behind by immense forest fires, I experience God's presence and the internal strength of the Chilean people.

Sr. Lorena Morales' life underwent a drastic change 20 years ago when she left the historically peaceful environment of her native Costa Rica for the violent setting of war-torn Sudan. For Morales, a member of the Comboni Missionary Sisters, it meant leaving the safety of a nation that abolished its army in 1948 after a five-week civil war, the last armed conflict the country was involved in. She has since shared the plight of Sudanese communities caught in fighting that for a total of four decades has battered the northeastern African nation.

"Kindness, no matter how small, is powerful. It transforms those who give and those who receive. And it's contagious."

GSR Today - As a writer, I know it's good to write when you're upset. Otherwise, you will never again be able to capture that raw, fearless emotion that is often critical in a piece of writing. It's also a great outlet for those emotions.

I share the fear of younger members that their religious communities are stuck. We are set in our ways and it is not exclusively that the "hierarchy won't let us change;" it is because we choose not to change. Will this entrenchment change without a deeper attention to primary relationships, a different commitment to common prayer, and a movement away from individualism to interdependence?

Four Kenyan sisters from the Little Daughters of St. Joseph Congregation run the Muyanza Health Center for the Byomba Diocese, but the missionary sisters are providing more than just health care. Seeing them as a rock of support for the community, residents have begun to accept the sisters into the fabric of their lives. In a country that is trying to outrun the shadow of its own history, trust can be the most precious commodity. And trust is something the sisters are slowly nurturing, despite their outsider status, as residents of Muyanza begin to reveal the terrible things they witnessed.

"Wisdom seeks the other, overcoming temptations to rigidity and closed-mindedness; it is open and in motion."

I was walking a path that thousands have walked for hundreds of years, moving among other religious people who put their fidelity into motion. There, among all those expressions of faith, I realized I wasn’t so sure what faith was.