A summer rain on an early Saturday morning invited me into the poetry of Thomas Merton. This Midwestern mystic and Trappist monk offers an invitation to enter into solitude and tend to the cry of our Mother Earth simply by listening to the rain. I watch the dance of the raindrops and hear the energy of life. It is a Merton moment calling me to a deeper integrity.

At Most Blessed Trinity Parish in Waukegan, Illinois, the largest parish within the Chicago archdiocese, 80 percent of the 7,000 parishioners are Hispanic. Though some are bilingual, many are not citizens, which keeps Sinsinawa Dominican Sr. Kathleen Long, the parish's director of community social services, especially busy. The parish center and its four-person staff offer English and literacy classes and courses to help in job training, computer skills and more.

The visa program that allows foreign religious workers, including women religious, to apply for permanent residency in the United States was set to expire Friday, but Congress did add it to a contingency budget late yesterday.

"The vocation of being a protector, it means protecting all creation, the beauty of the created world."

"Each one who is born comes into the world as a question for which old answers are not sufficient."

I live 90 miles from downtown Charlotte, but my emotions rushed with the people on the street, the boisterous crowd searching for answers. Not just in the crowded streets of the Queen City, but in the crowds of Illinois, Minnesota, South Carolina, Texas, California, and everywhere that parents cry, wives scream, and children question, “When is Daddy coming home?”

For Sr. Lizzy Chakkalakal, building houses for those who otherwise cannot afford them is her way of participating in the "ministry of redemption." The member of the Franciscan Missionaries of Mary, a religious congregation for women started in India in the 19th century, finds time to engage in this social activism in her busy schedule as the principal of Our Lady's Convent Girls Higher Secondary School, which is managed by her congregation in Kochi, the commercial capital of Kerala, a southern Indian state.

NCR board member Sr. Helen Garvey started her ministry in education, was elected to leadership and coordinated the exhibition, "Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America."

GSR Today - The Department of Justice announced in August it would stop using private contractors to house federal prisoners. Then the Department of Homeland Security announced it would examine its use of private contractors to hold detained immigrants. But don't think that private prisons are going away anytime soon.