Pope Francis's long-awaited encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’ tells a story and issues a call to all people to act on behalf of our common home. It offers much more than a treatise on the environment and climate change; it sets a cosmological context of belonging to creation as relatives, as brothers and sisters (11). It calls for an ecological spirituality and conversion (216), and offers a moral framework for both individual and collective response to care for our common home. As an Earth lawyer and Catholic sister striving to awaken people to the peril of Earth's desecration and the promise of acting as a single community of life, I hear Francis's story with gratitude and relief.

Sr. Martha Ann Kirk, a sister of the Incarnate Word, has spent years on the road, researching pockets of tolerance in hostile parts of the Middle East. Her research has brought her to Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Jordan, Israel and Palestine, as well as China and the halls of the United Nations. She is a professor of religious studies at the University of the Incarnate Word, San Antonio, Texas, and a prolific author.

Sr. Gabriel Mary Spaeth, SSND, and another School Sister administered hundreds of assessments over 16 years, carefully recording and transcribing the results of tests on 678 sisters in their U.S. community, to study the causes and effects of Alzheimer's disease. The data they carefully collected became the basis of the Nun Study, which led to groundbreaking research on aging and Alzheimer’s. Epidemiologist David Snowdon’s 2001 book, Aging with Grace, was based on that research and drew immense attention to Alzheimer’s disease. The painstaking records Spaeth collected remain available for researchers to compare with new findings.

So much has been written about the Leadership Conference of Women Religious of the USA particularly since April this year when the Vatican closed the controversial oversight of the LCWR. What I would like to express here is my/our deep gratitude to the LCWR for their exemplary way of going through this extremely painful and difficult process.

GSR Today - Though the situation in South Sudan continues to decline, there is joy in the midst of struggle. It isn’t confined to the South Sudanese – Br. Bill Firman of Solidarity with South Sudan says the Pauline sisters from Kenya have the same attitude.

"Organic buildings are the strength and lightness of the spiders' spinning . . . ."

Soon after I decided to ask to make my perpetual vows and was approved to do so, I became a bit obsessed with fire. It’s not a dangerous obsession or anything, it’s more that I am paying attention to all the ways that fire images and metaphors are incorporated into our culture and faith. I quickly became fascinated by what I was noticing and how often I heard popular song lyrics and ordinary conversation casually incorporate words like “fire,” “burn,” “spark” or “enflame.” It got me thinking about all the different ways we use the idea of fire – like in St. Francis of Assisi’s Canticle of Creation, where he offers praises to God for “Brother Fire,” for being so bright and lively.

From A Nun's Life podcasts - In this Random Nun Clip we talk with Sr. Heather Jean Foltz and Sister Mary Luke Jones about how "just a visit" led to an unexpected vocation with the Beech Grove Benedictines.