"Without a constant attachment to my phone, I felt like I was coming down from an overstimulated, frenetic state of being in the world to a more grounded, centered one."

Eighty-one-year-old Loretto Sr. Patricia McCormick likes to call herself a "farm kid from Illinois," but she's spent the last half-century preaching peace in Central America and, now, Denver. McCormick spoke with Global Sisters Report about nuclear disarmament, being pen pals with Jesuit Fr. Dan Berrigan, and the young activists of Black Lives Matter.

Dorothy Day frequently quoted Fyodor Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov: "Love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams." Southside Presbyterian Church in Tucson strives for love in action. Its website says it is a community of faith, hope, love and witness in the borderlands, briefly citing a history of racial integration and a vision of serving all. I visited the church in late April with a Loretto Community delegation to the border. 

Notes from the Field - I felt I was starting as a Good Shepherd Volunteer with my gas tank already on empty. But much to my surprise, my year of service provided me with the rejuvenation I was yearning for.

One of our novices asked me to share my experience of living the vowed life. I looked forward to an honest conversation — I wanted her to know the gift religious life is for me. After 59 years, it is still the best decision I ever made! Her first question, however, took me off guard. "What is a metaphor for your relationship with the hierarchical church?"

The Sister of Mercy's 39-acre Mercy Farm in Benson recently had a "BioBlitz" — a 24-hour period of intense biological surveying in May to attempt to record all the living species on the farm.

"The tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way. Some see Nature all ridicule and deformity . . . and some scarce see Nature at all. But, to the eyes of the man of imagination, Nature is imagination itself."

The chaos of China's Cultural Revolution dispersed the St. Therese of the Child Jesus congregation in the 1960s. In 1988, the congregation was reborn, and Sr. Ma Suling, who joined in 1992, today is superior general of 100 St. Therese sisters, who thrive by being "creative and active."

"To be truly radical is to make hope possible, rather than despair convincing."

GSR Today - One thing I love about my work at Global Sisters Report is meeting sisters who live and minister on the margins. Their invisibility, vulnerability and marginality struck me forcefully on a recent visit to Fiji to visit friends.