" . . . No politics, song, religion, behavior, or what not, is of account, unless it compare with the amplitude of the earth . . ."

When Sr. Dorothy Beck joined her congregation’s social work department, she had no inkling that she would soon become the beacon of hope for thousands displaced by a government dam project in a central Indian state. Beck was 44 in 1998 when she joined Pushp Kalyan Kendra, managed by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Chambery, in Ashta, a town in Madhya Pradesh state 543 miles south of New Delhi, India's capital. As an attorney and an on-the-ground activist, she spent years helping people displaced by a government dam project to assert their rights and eventually make livings as fishermen instead of farmers. As with similar mission work in places like Guatemala in years past, it was a dangerous undertaking.

GSR Today - Global Sisters Report is inspired to launch a text-message-based discussion group to try to bring our articles to sisters in Africa, an idea that crystallized while climbing the continent's highest peak

From A Nun's Life podcasts - How can both lament and hope be responses to the call for social justice?

Every day the Internet is growing bigger and more sophisticated. Twenty years ago, approximately 1 percent of the world’s population was online; today over 40 percent are online. That’s more than 3 billion people! It’s challenging to make sense of the vastness of the Internet, let alone contemplate the possibility of connecting personally with any of those 3 billion people! In the boundless expanse that is the Internet, will we be able to recognize the individual person or community in need?

"The movement to obtain equality for women in law and culture is actually a movement for social justice in accord with Catholic social teaching."

The Dorothy Bennett Mercy Center has been part of Brooklyn's neighborhood for 20 years. Its afterschool program gave Erika Sanchez, now 21 and in college, a safe place to grow and learn.

GSR Today - Since I was on assignment last year in South Sudan, it was more than casual interest that drew me to a new documentary currently making the rounds on the independent film circuit, both in New York and elsewhere in the United States.

The last time you thought about the people who work at the circus was probably the last time you were at the circus. Sr. Dorothy Fabritze, a Missionary Sister of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, has spent almost 16 years traveling with the circus, ministering to the workers and performers.

There is a question of whether the gender-based imbalance of power in Catholicism that made the apostolic visitation and doctrinal investigation possible in the first place is a human construct subject to reform, or a divinely established order to be maintained despite cultural change. In approaching this question I have found a distinction between classicism and historical consciousness.