At Most Blessed Trinity Parish in Waukegan, Illinois, the largest parish within the Chicago archdiocese, 80 percent of the 7,000 parishioners are Hispanic. Though some are bilingual, many are not citizens, which keeps Sinsinawa Dominican Sr. Kathleen Long, the parish's director of community social services, especially busy. The parish center and its four-person staff offer English and literacy classes and courses to help in job training, computer skills and more.

The visa program that allows foreign religious workers, including women religious, to apply for permanent residency in the United States was set to expire Friday, but Congress did add it to a contingency budget late yesterday.

"The vocation of being a protector, it means protecting all creation, the beauty of the created world."

"Each one who is born comes into the world as a question for which old answers are not sufficient."

I live 90 miles from downtown Charlotte, but my emotions rushed with the people on the street, the boisterous crowd searching for answers. Not just in the crowded streets of the Queen City, but in the crowds of Illinois, Minnesota, South Carolina, Texas, California, and everywhere that parents cry, wives scream, and children question, “When is Daddy coming home?”

For Sr. Lizzy Chakkalakal, building houses for those who otherwise cannot afford them is her way of participating in the "ministry of redemption." The member of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, a religious congregation for women started in India in the 19th century, finds time to engage in this social activism in her busy schedule as the principal of Our Lady's Convent Girls Higher Secondary School, which is managed by her congregation in Kochi, the commercial capital of Kerala, a southern Indian state.

NCR board member Sr. Helen Garvey started her ministry in education, was elected to leadership and coordinated the exhibition, "Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America."

GSR Today - The Department of Justice announced in August it would stop using private contractors to house federal prisoners. Then the Department of Homeland Security announced it would examine its use of private contractors to hold detained immigrants. But don't think that private prisons are going away anytime soon.

For the past two years I've been part of an investigative project, interviewing mothers of murdered children on the north side of St. Louis. The Peace Economy Project (PEP) received a small grant to research gun violence at home about eight months before Mike Brown was killed in Ferguson. We thought we could identify the efforts to stop gun violence in St. Louis and perhaps identify other cities that were doing a better job of community intervention.

Sr. Magdalena Pascual is one of six Oblate Sisters of the Most Holy Redeemer who does outreach work on La Línea, "The Line," Guatemala City's well-known, notorious red-light district. Seven days a week, nearly 24 hours a day, as many as 250 women or more ranging in age from their early 20s to mid-60s work as prostitutes on a barren, two-block stretch of grim row houses where a weed-covered train track divides the bleak street in half.