What does it mean to be a global citizen? Women religious and others grappled with that question during a recent United Nations conference in South Korea on education and global citizenship.
GSR Today - As a guest, I represented Global Sisters Report at the Union of Superiors General assembly in Rome; it was mind and heart expanding to be in the company of 900 sister leaders from around the world.
George Rodriguez is a freelance correspondent based in Costa Rica. He's been a correspondent for several international news agencies — Reuters, Inter Press Service (IPS), Agencia Mexicana de Noticias (Notimex) — and has contributed with other media. His beat has been mostly South and Central America, having done intensive coverage of repression under past dictatorships and of internal wars. He has also done work in Europe and West Africa.
The program offers children of prison inmates the opportunity to travel to visit their parents for Mother's and Father's Day. One inmate said he looks forward to the visit every year. "It keeps me positive."
When you think of places to pray, what comes first to mind? Maybe your parish church or a quiet place in the park. Maybe a prayer space at home. In the 21st century, the internet has increasingly become a place of prayer.
The third part of our series about trash management, landfills and the involvement of sisters: It is mostly women who eke out a living by sorting and reselling scrap materials from India's streets and landfills. The Jan Vikas Society labors among 10,000 people living in 35 of the 559 officially recognized shantytowns of Indore and was started by Divine Word Fr. George Payattikattu in 2001. He later included women religious in the work to elevate the waste pickers' confidence, skills and literacy, which has resulted in higher earnings and other improvements.
"Cultivate poverty like a garden herb, like sage. Do not trouble yourself much to get new things, whether clothes or friends. Turn the old; return to them. Things do not change; we change."
"To the degree that we are present to ourselves, we are in the very same act present to and with the Greater Than Self."
Internalized patriarchal values contribute to how women religious are treated in India, where activists are working to draw attention to the need for formal practices to handle clergy abuse of women religious, which ranges from withholding sacraments, to using nuns as domestic laborers, to taking over their institutions and to sexual abuse.
This past Sunday, my body tuned into a communal woundedness. It was as if, in a way, I could feel in my bones an echo of the laceration that had been inflicted upon my brothers and sisters during the massacre in Orlando a week prior.