For the past five years, Sr. Mary Do Thi Thuy of the Daughters of Mary Immaculate has quietly brought health care to hundreds of villagers with HIV in the Chinh Ly Commune of Ha Nam Province, northern Vietnam.

Right after Mother's Day, I received shocking news. My sister, Ginny, my only sibling, was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. Only 71 years old; this seemed unbelievable. Grief seeped through me.

"Evolution requires trust in the process of life itself because, from a faith perspective, there is a power at the heart of life that is divine and lovable."

National Geographic Emerging Explorer Ricardo Moreno is a man in a race against time. The Panamanian biologist's great love is the biggest cat in the Americas, the jaguar, which is being extinguished at a precipitous rate in Panama.

"By reading the scriptures I am so renewed that all nature seems renewed around me and with me. The sky seems to be a pure, a cooler blue, the trees a deeper green. The whole world is charged with the glory of God and I feel fire and music under my feet."

The survey is being turned into a manual, and an international study is in the works. "Once we can translate it into different cultures and languages, then it's a tool that can help move religious life into a viable future," says Divine Providence Sr. Maria Clara Kreis.

Franciscan Handmaids of the Most Pure Heart of Mary, one of three mostly black communities of women religious in the United States. announced they will sell their Harlem motherhouse as part of a restructuring effort. "We need to expand to places outside of New York as our number increases," said Sr. Gertrude Lilly Ihenacho, head of the congregation.

Long before the tropical birds began their sunrise call-and-response from the treetops, a sleepy band of travelers boarded their transport, headed deep into the heart of Panama's largest wetlands system.

"Coffee and pineapple, quince and avocado, guanabana and strange fruits from prickly palm trees, all of it there for the harvesting. Every step brought a new surprise."

This is our threshold moment and we need to get on board with evolution. Our refusal to see, our inability to hear the new sounds of a new world arriving, and our refusal to rearrange our comfortable lives are taking their toll.