GSR Today - Kate Kelly claims that Mormon women should have more input in church governance through ordination. Historically, that church teaches women have opportunities for leadership and service in other ways and the priesthood is exclusively for men to hold. It sounds familiar.

More than 52,000 minors traveling alone and 39,000 families have been picked up this fiscal year by U.S. agents at the Mexican border. The number of children traveling alone has doubled over a year ago and is more than seven times the number that was typical annually through 2011. For the past two months, volunteers acting on their own have been meeting immigrants at the bus station, providing food and helping the disoriented families navigate bus travel. As the numbers escalated, Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley opened two assistance centers.

" . . . I baptize you with water for repentance, but he who is coming after me is mightier than I . . . ."

GSR Today - As we in the Global North search for ways to expand our consciousness of ourselves as part of a global religious life, we need to continue to commit ourselves to finding new and effective ways to assist our sisters worldwide to become the “New women of the old faith” in their countries as our foremothers did in ours.

Katy Donchik, 17, not only travels around the world to volunteer, but was also student body president, a varsity softball player and star of her high school musical. Oh, and she wants to help people AND animals when she grows up.

In the past 20 years, what has become all the more clear is that there is a critical need for the prophetic voice of all people in the church and the world – a need to which women religious have responded decisively. The call for women religious and for the community of faith to be a corporate prophetic voice to address injustice throughout the world is clarion.

From A Nun's Life podcasts - Sr. Margaret Nacke, CSJ, and Sr. Ann Oestreich, IHM, talk about human trafficking, the role of poverty in the traffficking of women and men worldwide, and efforts being made to end trafficking.

For more than a dozen years, Sr. Ephrem Nguyen Thi Luu has been working with hundreds of families who have lived on small boats on rivers for generations in Hue City, central Vietnam. She is so commonly known among them that they call her “Me Luu” (Grandma Luu) instead of Sr. Luu. Sr. Luu, who was born to a Buddhist family in nearby Da Nang City, joined the Saint Paul de Chartres Sisters in 1960 and has served the disadvantaged for 40 years. 

GSR Today - Last fall, Pope Francis famously declared unfettered capitalism to be tyrannical, and he decried our tendency to idolize money. In many companies, this obsession with wealth and profits manifests itself as tyranny against the workers. Christian consumers have a moral and theological imperative to care about who makes our clothing and how companies we support value people.

"Practicing forgiveness does not mean accepting wrong doing."