As many organizations focus on empowering and educating girls, the Little Sisters of St. Francis of Assisi argue that boys are getting left behind. They're dedicating their center to rescuing boys from the streets. (This story includes a video.)

Celebrating the mystery of the Incarnation awakens in me profound hope. It recalls that Divine Presence is with us and in us. That our world is good and holy. It speaks to me that we have within us the capacity to open our arms wide to embrace our entire Earth community as our sisters and brothers and that we are all in this evolutionary journey together.

"We have the capacity for a new world and the capacity to destroy this world by failing in love. God will not clean up the mess we have created but we are being invited into a new future. It is time to let go of everything we are clinging to because whatever we possess divides us."

Notes from the Field - I concluded my mission as an English teacher in Dilla, Ethiopia. While it would have been nice to return for the fall semester, it was time for me to continue my year of volunteer service with the Salesians elsewhere, at their human rights office in Geneva, Switzerland.

In a federal courtroom, Sr. Janice Vanderneck squeezed her rosary beads, praying for a miracle: Martin Esquivel Hernandez's release from prison so he could be reunited with his wife and three young children. Esquivel has been charged with a felony for re-entering the United States from Mexico, which he and his family left to escape drug violence.

"We are called to walk the path of nonviolence in every sphere of our relationships. Like Jesus, we navigate relationships with each other, the state, society and economy each day. Each of these encounters offers us an opportunity to choose nonviolence grounded in unconditional love."

When I first joined the Xavier Community, I could not sit still. A recent college graduate, new to Kansas City and to my job at a local non-profit, I was eager to get involved in as many things as I could. Instead, I moved in with three Sisters of Charity and a few other young women and encountered stillness for the first time.

"We talk about three persons in one God because there's only one divine nature: what you have is one nature, individualized in a plurality of persons, and that makes them one because it is the one nature. If we are made in his image, then this whole notion of multiple races can't be. There's only one human race, one human nature. And, like God, it is individualized in a plurality of persons."

Thousands of young women in India have been helped by the National Domestic Workers Movement , a nongovernmental organization started in 1985 by Sr. Jeanne Devos, a Missionary Sister of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. Devos is from Belgium and has worked in India for the past 51 years.

Living singly instead of in community in Chicago, I've done my best to adjust and try to focus on the benefits rather than dwell on the deficits. Top among them is my view of Lake Michigan and my mornings spent contemplating it.