Sr. Janet Lehmann directs the nursing program of the University of Notre Dame Haiti's Jacmel campus, a program she says is helping build a foundation for Haiti, particularly as it recovers from Hurricane Matthew.

After efforts to persuade the Catholic church in India to deal with sexual abuse of women by clergy, and upset over the church's slow progress, a group of Christian women, mostly Catholics, announced steps for addressing the issue on their own. "We should move outside the church to seek answers to abuse cases. We should treat this problem as a crime and take recourse to the law," said Astrid Lobo Gajiwala, a lay woman theologian.

Men have been dominant as recipients, interpreters and transmitters of divine messages, while women have largely remained passive receivers of teachings and ardent practitioners of religious rituals. Attitudes developed around patriarchal interpretations of religious belief have defined and shaped the social and cultural contexts of Indian women resulting in their disempowerment and second-class status. In India, where politics uses religion as a tool to manipulate the masses, women bear the brunt of the consequences of cultural attitudes and the impact of religion and politics.

"Embrace the pace at which Earth does things."

Despite a 16-month campaign, Trump's concrete policy proposals still leave much to the imagination for those working in social justice ministries, but women religious share worries for the poor, immigrants and refugees, and women.

Notes from the Field - After a long flight from Washington, D.C., with a stopover in Dubai, and an 8-hour drive from the capital Addis Ababa, I finally arrived in the southern city of Dilla, Ethiopia, where I was going to spend the next five to six months. Dilla is one of four communities that the Salesian Sisters have in this country.

"We make friends. We talk to strangers. We pick up garbage. We paint a senior citizen's house. We volunteer. We start donating again. We reach out to friends, neighbors and relatives who voted for the other candidate, and we find the things we agree on."

In 1866, six "brave young sisters" started a school in post-Civil War Nashville. In the years that followed, the sisters' ministry has expanded across the state and helped shape the Catholic church in Tennessee.

The story begins with a request in 2010 from Bishop Emmanuel Trance of the diocese of Catarman, Northern Samar, one of the poorest provinces of the Philippines. Would our sisters, who run the Divine Word Hospital 150 miles away in Tacloban, open another?

Presentation Sr. Cecilia Suwannee Phetpanomporn's vocation took her from Thailand to Australia and back home again, where she now ministers to Karen refugees on the border with Burma.