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.

"In 2017, may we dedicate ourselves prayerfully and actively to banishing violence from our hearts, words and deeds, and to becoming nonviolent people and to building nonviolent communities that care for our common home. Nothing is impossible if we turn to God in payer. Everyone can be an artisan of peace."

"As brothers and sisters, therefore, all people are in relation with others, from whom they differ, but with whom they share the same origin, nature and dignity."