Three Stats and a Map - Earlier this week, the World Health Organization announced that Ethiopia was finally polio free. Yet, polio, not to mention other preventable diseases, are still found in other countries around the world.

From A Nun's Life podcasts - No time to spare for prayer? Road-tested ideas to rev up your prayer life!

Notes from the Field - Reading this blog, you may be sitting and relaxing after a long day or week at work or you may still be at work wishing you were sitting and relaxing at home. Either way, I want you to stop for a moment, close your eyes and think, “Is this a big world we live in or a small world?”

"Can we even know what ripples our lives make? Can we help each other see?"

GSR Today - Through the use of nonviolence, women religious throughout history have resisted injustice, which has made some of them iconoclasts - even if that wasn't the intended purpose. 

Sr. Georgette Marjorie Kabong belongs to the Institute of Sisters Franciscan Missionaries of Mary. She has a master's degree in socio-anthropology and management.  For 10 years she worked as coordinator of local projects with the Pensar Institute for Jesuits and as director of the Women's School in Orito, Colombia. From 2008 to 2011, she was part of the provincial counsel in Kinshasa, coordinating the young religious program. Now she works with women who are victims of sexual violence in Goma, Democratic Republic of Congo.

Commentary - In mid-April of this year, I was one of 38 Catholic leaders from 22 different Catholic reform organizations that met in Limerick, Ireland, in a four-day conference to discuss the state of the church. We spoke about the need to revitalize the church and the issue of authority as key in that revitalization. We spoke about the need of the Vatican to decentralize in favor of strengthening the local churches.

"Our response cannot be to go backwards – that is impossible. Rather we enter the future from this paradigm acknowledging its strengths and limits so as to include that which is of value as we continue outward interpreting our reality from this new place."

GSR Today - Balance, it seems, is often the real key to success for any organization with a mission. You can’t, after all, do everything. And you can’t always do the things you’d like to in exactly the way you’d like to do them. You have to find a balance between the mission at hand and the resources available.

Commentary - The LCWR experience is a 21st-century story and the latest version of this “uneasy alliance” that American sisters have negotiated and finessed, both within the church and in secular society where male, hierarchical authority and gendered politics have usually defined the terms and set the parameters of power, status and leadership.