See for Yourself - One of the highlights of summer is going to the fair. It doesn’t matter what type – county fair, regional fair, state fair. Any fair is a grand celebration of what’s best about society, including agriculture, home arts, food and community.

Unlike some predictions, Sr. Mary Johnson’s vision of what a successful religious institute will look like 20 years from now flows from statistical analysis. Relying on two major studies of women religious conducted 10 years apart, Johnson and two other academics look at the experiences of women who entered religious life in the United States after 1965 in a new book, New Generations of Catholic Sisters: The Challenge of Diversity. 

GSR Today - Assistant editor Tracy Abeln and I were at the LCWR National Assembly staffing the NCR/Global Sisters Report exhibit booth. I’ll be reflecting on Nancy Schreck’s insightful and thought-provoking keynote presentation for days to come. For now, one quotation Nancy included continues to resonate with me. It’s the one by Alice Walker which provoked immediate applause.

"We met ‘To uplift woman's fallen divinity / Upon an even pedestal with man,’ And strange as it may seem to many we then and there declared our right to vote according to the Declaration of the government under which we live." 

Insight - Global Sisters Report reprints an excerpt from New Generations of Catholic Sisters: The Challenge of Diversity by Mary Johnson, S.N.D. de N., Patricia Wittberg, S.C., and Mary L. Gautier, with permission from Oxford University Press USA.  © 2014 Oxford University Press.

In 1958, eight Dominican sisters from Sparkill, N.Y., traveled to Bahawalpur, Pakistan, as missionaries. Within seven years, a Pakistani congregation of Dominican sisters was receiving its first postulants. Today, there are 14 Pakistani Sparkill Dominicans sisters serving Pakistan’s Christian community in education and health ministries. Two of them talked to GSR about their ministries while visiting their U.S. motherhouse this month.

This morning I was challenged by an inner energy inviting me to “Listen to my longing.” As this invitation settled in my heart, I felt my gut moving toward panic. Where is my longing leading me today? Can I honestly answer this question?

It’s impossible to know exactly how many women entered religious life with an unrequited or latent desire for priestly ministry. But if the current number of Womenpriests who used to be sisters is any indication, it was more than a few. There’s no hard data on the issue, but insiders at Roman Catholic Womenpriests, an international organization that has ordained about 103 women and married men since 2002, estimate that more than half of the women they’ve ordained were once Catholic sisters. 

The nationwide campaign for 10 million signatures to pass a bill that will abolish the pork barrel system kicked off here today with a rally in Luneta Park co-organized with the Association of Major Religious Superiors of the Philippines (AMRSP). The campaign is part of an effort needed to enact a law drafted through "people's initiative" that would prohibit all forms of pork-barrel budgeting, explained Benedictine Sr. Mary John Mananzan, co-convener of Abolish Pork Movement civil society group.

From A Nun's Life podcasts - Does a fire burn within certain people that compels them to want more from their religion? Sr. Patricia Wittberg talks about people who are constantly searching.