GSR Today - National Catholic Reporter online has launched a new feature, about books that have changed people's lives. The second one, this week, is an essay from Sr. Sandra Schneiders about Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning.

"What does surrender look like amid the busyness of daily life?"

Notes from the Field - The next few weeks will be an important time for my husband and I as we discern what our relationship to Big Laurel Learning Center will be six months from now.

I must confess that often the yearly ritual of receiving ashes on my forehead at the beginning of Lent has become dangerously routine. Certainly I pause at the solemnity of the occasion, but it has never touched me with the power that it will this year.

For the first time, Georgetown University's Center of Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA) conducted a study on men and women who have just entered religious institutes.

Eight more families of asylum-seekers were released from federal detention after they were rounded up in a federal deportation effort last month, bringing the total to 33 people in 12 families who have been released so far.

"The whole universe and all events are sacred (doorways to the divine) for those who know how to see. In other words, everything that happens is potentially sacred if you allow it to be."

GSR Today - We live in a society that has historically told and continues to tell black girls that they are not enough. So it takes a certain courage for black women to say, "No, we are beautiful, we are made in the image of God, and we are more than enough." It takes a certain courage to celebrate our blackness without apology and without caveat, and to insist that we are worthy of respect.

GSR Today - Today, Feb. 8, is the International Day of Prayer and Awareness Against Human Trafficking, and it's no coincidence that it is also the feast day of St. Josephine Bakhita: The date was chosen at the request of women religious to highlight her life.

After being involved with anti-trafficking efforts for 10 years, I received a grant from the Louisville Institute to study the resilience of women who have been trafficked here in the United States. Through my interviews, I discovered a face of the human trafficking reality that is rarely addressed. Survivors themselves made it clear that they would like more focus on their growth, goals and strength — on who they have become in their own resilience.