I recently sat with a good friend as she received yet another round of chemo for reoccurring cancer. Our visit was a tender time of connecting and conversing about what really matters. My friend, a longtime spiritual seeker in the Catholic tradition, confessed that she doesn't really know for sure whether there is an afterlife. The notion that her body's molecules will melt into the "great-all" of the universe isn't so very attractive. This idea seems to be an extant theme in contemporary scientific-cosmological explanations about where we've come from and where we are going. From the perspective of pure biology, it seems quite correct.

“A human being is a vessel that God has built for himself and filled with his inspiration so that his works are perfected in it.”

Three Stats and a Map - Last week, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reiterated its call for a “paradigm shift” when it comes to the way the world approaches food production. Speaking at a weeklong agriculture and gardening event in Berlin, the group’s director-general, José Graziano da Silva, said that in order to keep up with the growing population, our current food production system would have to surmount near impossible obstacles.

I was fortunate teaching “African World: Introduction to Contemporary Africa,” in the historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C. (where the student body is largely of African descent), fortunate because I was involved in assisting my students to work out and rework their African identity while examining the place of Africa in the contemporary global world.

GSR Today - The Sisters of Mary Morning Star is an Association of the Faithful, established in June 2014 in Bergara, Spain. There are about 250 members in 10 countries, including 10 women, ranging in age from 24 to 50, who live in the small town of Ghent, Minn. Their community belongs to an ancient cenobitic form of religious practice, which includes solitary and communal life.

The fact that so many holy founders have been celebrated by Catholics over the centuries suggests that some women religious who aspire to prophecy today may also be called to tasks of institutional creation and construction, tasks we might refer to “founding” and “re-founding,” and in some cases to institution maintenance as well.

"The mysteries rang true in daily life as bead by bead she prayed for a broken world."

Chaldean religious find peace and hope in Chicago - “We are who we are today because of our love for Christ," Fr. Fawaz Kako says. "In the midst of our chaos, he creates order.” Kako is is part of the ethnic Chaldean community of Catholics who have moved to the United States from the Middle East, where Christians have been a minority and persecuted for centuries. Chicago has two Chaldean Catholic parishes, where he, Fr. Sanharib Youkhana and Sr. Margaret Homa carry out their work ministering to about 7,000 people.

GSR Today - It is the U.S. federal holiday honoring the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who dedicated his life and ministry to fighting for the marginalized and poor people. So this week’s blog starts with the marginalized – in this case, unaccompanied minors attempting to immigrate to the United States – and ends with the poor, and a new way to identify them.