"Gracious words are a honeycomb, sweet to the soul and healing to the bones."

The Immaculate Conception Monastery, a grand convent that crowns the rolling landscape for miles, is home to about 150 Sisters of St. Benedict. It's also home to four sisters. During the first half of the 1900s, it was common for multiple siblings to enter religious life. We talked with four of them who are Benedictines: Sr. Mary Carmen Spayd and Sr. Mary Carmel Spayd, who are twins, and Sr. Rosemary Dauby and Sr. Agnes Marie Dauby, who were born a year apart.

News that Pope Francis signed the decree setting a date for Mother Teresa's canonization has cheered people of Kolkata, an eastern Indian city that the world renowned nun had made her home for more than half a century.

GSR Today - Syrian refugees I have been talking to these past two weeks cautiously welcome the news that Russia plans to withdraw forces from their home country. Today marks an international #PrayForRefugees campaign on the fifth annivesary of the conflict.

"And when the dialogue is over and decisions or directions determined, the last requirement to be fulfilled is that of letting go."

GSR Today - Since 1994, when 65 religious women gathered to share their emerging environmental dreams with one another, Sisters of Earth has expanded; their next gathering concentrates on indigenous wisdom and four women who are standing up against the effects of extractive industries.

Sr. Orla Treacy of the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, also known as the Loreto Sisters, from the Irish town of Bray in County Wicklow is the principal of Loreto Secondary School in Rumbek in Lakes State, considered the premier girls' school in South Sudan.

"The great contract in literature is this: you tell me your story and somehow I get my story." - Patricia Hempl . . . In this spirit I begin. At the psychiatrist's office a devoted daughter thinks to leave trouble behind and take her frail father across the border to a peaceful place. At a Texas border shelter, a Sister puts an indigenous Guatemalan woman and her son on a Greyhound bus destined for Ohio and safety.

"If I am indeed called upon to speak as a moral authority, I know that what I say will be rooted in the real lives of so many people I know and love. My life commitment binds me inextricably to all of humankind and the rest of Creation. What a humbling and demanding privilege."