It is May, and like every good Catholic girl of a certain age, I remember this as the month we celebrate Mary, the mother of Jesus. A lot of terrific recent scholarship is helping my generation recover from earlier interpretations of Mary as a revered (if impossible to imitate) virgin-mother role model often portrayed as silent, passive, and obedient.

GSR Today - Most of us know migrants as numbers or through stories we read; recently, I had the opportunity to go on a Border Witness Program retreat and, with four Mercy associates, see several ministries in the Rio Grande Valley firsthand.

by Elizabeth Eisenstadt Evans

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Last summer, Sr. Melinda Pellerin stood before friends and parishioners at Holy Name Parish in Springfield, Massachusetts, where she serves as a pastoral minister, and professed her first vows as a Sister of St. Joseph of Springfield. Pellerin — then 57, a widow and retired — made history as the congregation's first African-American sister.

Betty Ann Maheu is a Maryknoll Sister with degrees in drama, theology, Italian and Chinese. She spent 18 years in Hawaii teaching and doing education administration before serving on the Maryknoll leadership team then with the International Union of Superiors General as a coordinating editor and translator for the UISG main publication (Bulletin). A frequent traveler to China, she has taught English there and for 15 years served at the Holy Spirit Study Centre in Hong Kong.

This story appears in the Notes from the Field feature series. View the full series.

by Brenna Neimanis

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Notes from the Field - Anyone who has spent any amount of time with me knows that I like noise. The weekend of May 14, all of the East Coast Good Shepherd volunteers spent their time at a retreat center in New Jersey. This particular retreat happened to be a Silent Spirituality Retreat, which could also be referred to as my worst nightmare.

Because of my ministries I have never lived near relatives or my grade school friends as their children grew up. Recently my cousin moved to Lansing, Michigan, not too far from Detroit. One of her many grandchildren was making his first Holy Communion, and I was invited to attend. I accepted, and as I drove on this beautiful Saturday morning I found myself filling up with tears.