Notes from the Field - It is hard to believe that this will be my final week of living in community with the 14 Mission San Jose Dominican sisters whom I have come to care for and respect so deeply this past year. Last week, a new sister moved into the convent, and her arrival got me thinking about one impressive and invaluable aspect of the community at Immaculate Conception Priory.

Three Stats and a Map - Yesterday was the kickoff of the End Detention Week of Action, the brainchild of several groups dedicated to ending immigrant detention in the United States. 

Commentary - What does one need to live a dignified life? Here in India we speak of roti, kapda aur makan (food, clothes and shelter).Today we add education and health as very essential for any human person to climb the economic ladder. Yet it is unbelievable that more than 20 percent of people in the capital of Bihar – Patna city – live on about $2 (U.S.) a day in families of a minimum of five members. I am astonished at times by how those who live below the poverty line survive.

GSR Today - The professional world has had a tendency to champion the idea of competition, but for women at least, that is not the best strategy for success. We can all do well together, at the same time.

Pope Francis's long-awaited encyclical on the environment, Laudato Si’ tells a story and issues a call to all people to act on behalf of our common home. It offers much more than a treatise on the environment and climate change; it sets a cosmological context of belonging to creation as relatives, as brothers and sisters (11). It calls for an ecological spirituality and conversion (216), and offers a moral framework for both individual and collective response to care for our common home. As an Earth lawyer and Catholic sister striving to awaken people to the peril of Earth's desecration and the promise of acting as a single community of life, I hear Francis's story with gratitude and relief.

Sr. Martha Ann Kirk, a sister of the Incarnate Word, has spent years on the road, researching pockets of tolerance in hostile parts of the Middle East. Her research has brought her to Iraq, Iran, Turkey, Jordan, Israel and Palestine, as well as China and the halls of the United Nations. She is a professor of religious studies at the University of the Incarnate Word, San Antonio, Texas, and a prolific author.

Sr. Gabriel Mary Spaeth, SSND, and another School Sister administered hundreds of assessments over 16 years, carefully recording and transcribing the results of tests on 678 sisters in their U.S. community, to study the causes and effects of Alzheimer's disease. The data they carefully collected became the basis of the Nun Study, which led to groundbreaking research on aging and Alzheimer’s. Epidemiologist David Snowdon’s 2001 book, Aging with Grace, was based on that research and drew immense attention to Alzheimer’s disease. The painstaking records Spaeth collected remain available for researchers to compare with new findings.

So much has been written about the Leadership Conference of Women Religious of the USA particularly since April this year when the Vatican closed the controversial oversight of the LCWR. What I would like to express here is my/our deep gratitude to the LCWR for their exemplary way of going through this extremely painful and difficult process.