See for Yourself - Hearing a voice close to me jars me out of a book I'm reading on a park bench. I look up at the speaker — a middle-aged fellow who had sat down on the other end of the bench. "Do you mind if I smoke?" he repeats.

"Life is found in the cracks moving us beyond our boxed visions and breaking our limitations."

For almost 40 years, the United States has had some of the strongest regulations in the world for managing waste storage and disposal, but people are still affected by and dealing with consequences of past actions. In the case of radioactive waste from nuclear weapons development and nuclear power plants, the problems are ongoing.

A summer rain on an early Saturday morning invited me into the poetry of Thomas Merton. This Midwestern mystic and Trappist monk offers an invitation to enter into solitude and tend to the cry of our Mother Earth simply by listening to the rain. I watch the dance of the raindrops and hear the energy of life. It is a Merton moment calling me to a deeper integrity.

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?”